Japan’s Hisaki Matsuura: Decadence in the time of evil encounters

Hisaki Matsuura, a professor in the French department at Tokyo University, is clearly comfortable in the place where the gothic and the decadent meet. On the gothic side he gives us the sinister philosopher, Koyama, who may be a master calligrapher; a damsel, Tomoe, who may be in distress; and an estate that, though in the midst of Tokyo’s shitamachi (downtown) in the mid-1990s, feels remote both in place and time and includes secret passages as well as the overheated conservatory, rank with tropical decay, where the aesthete holds forth.