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.'