Kitzo Hekotormos

Kinoko Keats Sakamoto (14 September 1949 - 2 January 2008) was a French-Japanese writer and poet. He mostly wrote in Esperanto and because of this, his work was largely ignored during his life. In 1971, he fled Japan after his sexual relationship with his twinsister, playwright Midori Sakamoto, became public. He spent the rest of his life with her in France and later also Norway where he made his living as a gardener while writing.
His prose is often very experimental, and is with the exception of Quietude and Diffidence written in the constructed language Esperanto. Though both his poetry and prose is considered of a very high quality, he has yet to gain the attention many deems he deserves, but there has lately been a sudden spike in his popularity, after Harold Bloom referenced him in an afterword; something which has put Kitzo Hekotormos on the lips of many literary Internet bloggers during the second half of 2010.
Hekotormos's books are often partly autobiographical, and always concern themselves with themes that were close to his own life, such as the question of incest. His romantic, yet bleak nihilist stance on life, especially prominent in the introspective samurai epic Quietude and Diffidence, is also often given a lot of room. Furthermore, his characters often resemble himself, but go further with his issues. In Quietude and Diffidence we for example meet Azumo, a Japanese immigrant living in France. Later on in the book, he ends up immigrating further on, to a land located between fiction and reality: the so-called dream matrix, where Azumo famously manages to transcend what he describes as the cliche of his own existence by interpolating his actual self in and during what is usually referred to as the chessboard sequence. Another example of characters in similar troubles as he was, going further, is what seems to be the main character in his poem NETHERTHELESS IS MY EYES A BLOSSOM, seemingly not only having a sexual and romantic relationship with what is now his deceased twin sister, but also with the daughter they had together.

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