Tosa Motokiyu (along with collaborators Ojiu Norinaga and Okura Kyojin) first came to prominence in the mid-1990s as a purported translator of the Japanese poet and survivor of the Hiroshima massacre, Araki Yasusada. When Yasusada was revealed as an elaborate fiction, Motokiyu presented himself as the author of the works in question, and subsequently asserted that “Motokiyu” itself was merely the pen name of an author whose legal will requested that his true name never be revealed. As with the transcribed “tape-essay” here, Motokiyu's works locate themselves in a truly international sense of the avant-garde, and often take apart the idea of authorship in ways that are both playful and dark. He was believed to have died of cancer in 1996, but the tape essay included here carries some surprising new news. An introduction to the Yasusada controversy can be entered via Jacket Magazine.


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