Journal of asian Humanities at KyusHu university it is a simplistic reworking of Buddhist imagery. The origins of this "contemplation of dismemberment" are to be found not only in Buddhist thought and practice, but in the aesthetic of the grotesque, which was properly developed in Japan, especially as eroguro, during the modern period and which engages all three visual influences-anatomical dissection, the nude in Japanese art, and self-mutilation/suicide-mentioned above. Thus, we find a

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... ence of Buddhist ideas and visual culture with those of the grotesque, a convergence that helps us to reappraise both. I additionally propose that even though the types of gazes prompted by the subjects of depictions of bodies of the dissected, of the nude, of suicide, and the grotesque (as a general visual aesthetic), and the functions of those gazes appear to be significantly different, they in fact present similarities with those ideally galvanized by the kusōzu. The main similarity is in the treatment of unstable boundaries and [dis]memberment. The types of gazes also present comparable anxieties concerning the act of looking. Through examining Matsui's paintings in the contexts of the western nude/classical body in Meiji-period Japanese academic art, anatomical dissection, suicide, and the aesthetics of the European grotesque and Japanese eroguro, I show that the strongest influence on her work is late nineteenth-century to mid-twentieth-century Japanese culture, particularly the "interwar period" of the 1920s and '30s, and the immediate post-war period, a period in which Seiu was active. 5 The reason Matsui's influences can be found here is because the period was one of development of new ways of viewing the body and death, which included interest in, and aestheticized, various types of dismemberment. Moreover, these interests and aesthetics are motifs of modernity in this period rather than those of a backlash against it, which complicates understandings of her art that present it as a harmonious fusion of east and west, tradition and modernity. Matsui's work and its influences also provide an excellent demonstration 5 This is not to disregard the connections to late twentieth-century art both apanese and non-apanese, such as works by Aida Makoto, ans ellmer, and oel-Peter itkin, that Matsui cites in her own doctoral dissertation and in interviews, but rather to draw to the surface a collection of submerged and largely overlooked influences. See Matsui uyuko, Chikaku shinkei to shite no shikaku ni yotte kakusei sareru ts kaku no fukahi (Ph diss., Tokyo University of the Arts, 200 ). There are also some signi cant links with postwar sado-masochistic images, but these will, for the most part, be put aside in this paper.