‘There are two reasons he remained single throughout his life,’ Fujisaki responded in an interview in the art magazine Moon and Light. ‘He once said that the widow in the house on top of the hill was modelled on a real person, and I commented, half teasingly, that she can’t be the reason he’d never married, but in his response he implied that she was. When I tried to question him further on this, though, he became evasive and I don’t know the details.
‘I think a much bigger reason why he stayed single is because of his experience in the army. He did at one point say that he wasn’t the sort of person suited to having a family. That was when he was talking about the weird craziness that slips into his works, and the stench of death that is always present in his black humour.
‘Now that the
