Much of the inspiration for Kyoto Nocturnes and One Hundred Views of Maiko and Geiko comes from woodblock prints. The shin-hanga (new prints) of Yoshida Hiroshi and Kawase Hasui strongly influenced the look of Elegant Slaughter and the night views of maiko and geiko taken in Gion Kobu and Miyagawa-cho.

Both Yoshida and Kawase limited the number of colors they used in their night prints, with beautiful results. All the prints shown here combine darker colors (several shades of blue, brown, and black) with brighter and warmer tones (yellow, red, and orange). I wanted Kyoto Nocturnes to have a similar color scheme, and cinematographer Akihiro Matsuura and I used several of these prints as guides during preproduction.

I wasn’t conscious of it at first while I was working on One Hundred Views of Maiko and Geiko, but I came to realize that my favorite night views all feature bright (sometimes purposefully overexposed) streetlamps or lanterns as the main light source in the photograph. As you can see, Yoshida and Kawase employ a similar technique in their prints. I love to photograph maiko and geiko in the rain with their red and purple umbrellas, and several of my favorite shin-hanga depict dark, rain-slicked streets with splashes of light and color, much like my photographs.

In fact, I have always thought of my images of maiko and geiko as ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world), not photographs. So, I think the best description of my work would probably be “ukiyo-e photographs.” I titled the book One Hundred Views of Maiko and Geiko after Hiroshige’s One Hundred Views of Edo and Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, both famous woodblock print series. I named many of the night views “Nocturnes” after another of my favorite artists, the American painter James McNeill Whistler. Whistler was also influenced by ukiyo-e, so the titles seemed especially appropriate.

The ukiyo-e of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, my favorite artist, are the most imaginative, dynamic, and macabre works of art I have ever seen. His earlier prints are famous for their blood and violence, but his later works portray the moment just before or after violence erupts. All his prints have a disturbing yet fascinating beauty to them. There are at least eight murders (in only 22 minutes!) in Elegant Slaughter. While I was thinking about how I wanted to depict this violence on screen, Yoshitoshi’s prints gave me ideas for a hopefully new style of action.

The people depicted in Yoshitoshi’s prints – warriors, madmen, ghosts, murderers, corpses, and beautiful women – are the same characters you will find in Elegant Slaughter and all the other parts of Kyoto Nocturnes. I hope you enjoy these prints, Kyoto Nocturnes, Part I: Elegant Slaughter, and One Hundred Views of Maiko and Geiko.