Usually reviews of Nobuyoshi Araki's work start by pointing out the contradictions "monster," "genius," "pornographer," "artist," etc. The greatest negative routinely cited is his attitude toward women, photographed smeared with paint or bound in bondage ropes, images that reflect attitudes rooted in Edo's ancient past or Tokyo's modern sexual underworld.
But this kind of moralistic approach doesn't quite fit a subject like Araki, who is more a force of nature, existing, in some Nietzschean space beyond good and evil, or at least "good and evil" as defined by middle-class Western journalists like Adrian Searle in The Guardian. In a review of the show "Nobuyoshi Araki: Self, Life, Death," at London's Barbican last year, Searle slyly hinted that Araki's depictions of women placed him beyond the pale of some liberal leftwing acceptability, before trying to find some level on which he could be "redeemed.''
Araki's present book and show, "Tokyo Jinsei," covers much of the same ground as the Barbican show with a similar 40-year-plus range, although, typically, the "pornographic" element has been watered down for a Japanese audience.