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.
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Hijikata's period as a public performer and choreographer extended from his performance of Kinjiki in 1959 to his famous solo work, Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese People: Revolt of the Body (inspired by preoccupations with the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus and the work of Hans Bellmer) in 1968, and then to his solo dances within group choreography such as Twenty-seven Nights for Four Seasons in 1972.
Eikoh Hosoe - Japanese photographer and filmmaker who photographed a series of images with dancer Tatsumi Hijikata as kamaitachi