EIKO KOIKE IS a leggy, lushly upholstered Japanese model, famous for her doe-eyes and D-cup breasts. Normally paid millions of yen a day to squeeze her pneumatic body into designer clothes, sports cars or anything else that needs flogging, she can be found posing a slightly different look in a glossy coffee-table book on sale in Japanese bookstores: lying dead in a Tokyo pachinko parlour. Made up to perfection and wearing a skimpy Gianni Versace evening dress that barely covers the 'Chest that Sold 1,000 Products', Koike stares lifelessly up at the ceiling, alone and surrounded by scattered pachinko balls. She looks odd enough - but that's until you come to actress Mari Natsuki, lying broken and discarded in a truck full of overripe tomatoes, wearing a Luisa Beccaria dress. The Last View was put together by fashion photographer Kaoru Izima. Each set of photos has a description of the model and what they're wearing. Izima plans to publish an English version to make his work accessible worldwide. Izima has been taking photos of beautiful 'corpses' since 1993. Now 50, the Tokyo native has mellowed. In his previous three books, the almost exclusively female subjects were stabbed, shot and strangled. In Landscapes with a Corpse, gorgeous women are strewn across snowy fields, beaches and bamboo forests all over Japan, the apparent victims of a serial killer. 'When I started, I placed a lot of emphasis on making the models look realistically dead,' Izima says in his studio in Tokyo's up-market Meguro district. 'Now, I'm not that concerned. I don't want to frighten the viewers.' The obvious question that comes to mind after viewing his work is: Does he hate women? 'Not at all,' he says. 'Quite the opposite. I love women. I'm asked this question far more in Europe than Asia: Why do you use women and show them in these poses? My answer is that I'm not forcing the women to do this against their will. They do it because they want to. Some people think that I'm selling sex and making money or something, but that's not my purpose at all. But I realise that I can explain this all I want and some people will never understand.' So, why does he shoot mostly female models? 'I'm a photographer for women's magazines, so that's what I'm used to,' Izima says. 'But, more importantly, when you ask women about how they'd like to die, their answers are always much more interesting and imaginative. Men are too serious and scared of death, and their answers are usually boring. They always say things like, 'I'd like to die surrounded by naked women'.' The project grew, he says, out of frustration with fashion work. 'I got tired of the blandness of shooting fashion gigs,' Izima says. 'There's much more to life than looking cool in a Mercedes and eating and drinking. I began to wonder why fashion magazines exclude the rest of life, and especially death. People die in road accidents and murders all the time. Today, we're alive, but tomorrow we may not be. Dying is a huge part of the human experience, so why not show this, too?' So began what he calls his 'obsession' as he started to ask initially reluctant actresses and models to pose. 'I talked to editors and they said, 'That doesn't sound like a good idea'. So, I made my own quarterly magazine,' Izima says. 'The first woman I managed to persuade was actress Kyoko Koizumi. She said it sounded really interesting, and because she was an actress she wasn't especially scared of the idea of playing dead. After she agreed, it wasn't hard to get others because they said, 'Oh if someone that famous has done it ...' And it took off.' To date, 43 top models and actresses have passed through Izima's viewfinder, including Hong Kong's Michelle Reis, who appeared in Landscapes with a Corpse, and Belgian actress Helena Noguerra. He says a further 30 or 40 are lined up, even though he doesn't pay and the shoots can be long and arduous. Look closely at the exterior shots and you can see that many of his subjects have goose pimples. 'I no longer have to ask the models,' Izima says. 'They ask me.' Why do they do this for free? 'I don't know,' he says. 'I suppose actresses are highly motivated to act, whether they get paid or not, and this project interests them. Of course, nobody wants to die and most people are too terrified to imagine what it would really be like, but I think the models in The Last View thought, well, if I'm going to die, this way might be nice - a way I have chosen myself.' Joe Chan Sinn-gi, Michelle Reis' manager, says he thinks highly of Izima's artistic talent, and says Reis would gladly collaborate with him again. 'He is very sensitive and able to capture subtlety,' Chan says. Asked if such photos would have a negative impact on people with suicidal tendencies, he says their motivation is purely artistic. 'The book was targeted at the Japanese market. The Japanese culture tends to regard death as beautiful. We only did the shoot as a kind of cultural exchange. It was purely artistic performance and we didn't feel the photographer was advocating death.' Izima's pursuit of his macabre hobby coincides with what many describe as a suicide epidemic in Japan. Last year, 94 people took their own lives every day, setting a record of 34,427 that broke the previous high of 33,048, set in 1999. Since the Asian financial crisis of 1997-8, suicides have claimed three times more lives than traffic accidents. The proliferation of websites that promote it, along with the publication of books such as The Suicide Manual - which has sold more than one million copies - has generated so much concern that the media may be fuelling the phenomenon. Izima denies that his images promote or glamorise death, however. 'I'm not trying to show that death is beautiful, just that it's something people need not be afraid of,' he says. 'And I think the models know this, too.' He says he doesn't shoot suicides. 'I'm against it, even though that will come up in discussions with my subjects,' Izima says. 'For example, in The Last View, two of my models, Ai Kato and Mika Nakashima, who are friends, said they wanted to die together in a suicide pact, but I said no. [The pictures show the two lying on a bed together, dressed in Vivienne Westwood French maid outfits]. Granted, you can't tell this from looking at the picture, but that's my rule. Suicide is by choice, but I depict death that is not by choice, and that is exactly what is beautiful to me.' Yukio Saito, the head of Japan's largest telephone helpline, Inochi no Denwa, says books such as The Suicide Manual and The Last View are 'not desirable', but doubts that they have any impact on Japan's soaring suicide rates. 'There wasn't any notable spike in rates after the publication of these books,' he says. 'Some people may actually find them comforting, and many find solace and help on the internet, too. So, it would be difficult to support more government controls. The authors don't induce death. They just suggest it and the reaction depends on people who read them.' Saito also disagrees that there's anything particularly Japanese in books about death. 'They had a suicide manual in France, and in America there's the Hemlock Society, which also gives instructions on suicide,' he says. Joanne Lai Pui-king a crisis counsellor at the Samaritan Befrienders' Suicide Crisis Intervention Centre in Hong Kong, says guidelines should be printed in such books, explaining clearly that the death scenes are faked and intended to help people understand death better. 'It's not necessarily a bad thing to stir up discussions about death through such photos,' she says. 'Discussions can make the issue more transparent.' But her colleague, Michael Wong Chun-hon, is concerned that the images could increase suicidal tendencies in people who already have such thoughts. 'People with a suicidal tendency could pick up a fascination about death from literature and visual arts that romanticise the issue,' he says. 'They tend to be attracted to discomforting images.' In The Last View, Izima says he's tried to portray the spirit leaving the body. 'I asked my models a series of questions: 'How would you prepare for death? Where would you like to die?' On the shoot, I tell them to imagine their final breath, their final moments on this earth. I try to capture this look in their eyes, the beautiful, last moment of life.' The photos show the body from four different angles, including a close-up and a long-shot as the soul travels upwards. Izima's questions were rewarded with some startling answers. Natsuki, for example, chose death at the hands of a murderous truck driver. As for the tomatoes: 'She had a very poor childhood and imagined herself dead and surrounded by food,' Izima says. 'We started with apples, but tomatoes are better because they get squashed and are more visually striking.' And Koike? 'She grew up over a pachinko shop and she wanted to die while playing,' Izima says. 'She had just hit the jackpot and keeled over from shock.' Does he ever go into shock himself when he sees all these beautiful women up close? 'No,' he says, with a laugh. 'They never look as good in person as they do in pictures.' Additional reporting by Yi Hu