Many of his early works were inspired by figures of European literature such as the Marquis de Sade and the Comte de Lautréamont, as well as by the French Surrealist movement, which had exerted an immense influence on Japanese art and literature, and had led to the creation of an autonomous and influential Japanese variant of Surrealism, whose most prominent figure was the poet Shuzo Takiguchi, who perceived Ankoku Butoh as a distinctively 'Surrealist' dance-art form.