[1] By the late 1960s, he had begun to develop this dance form, which is highly choreographed with stylized gestures drawn from his childhood memories of his northern Japan home.

[4] He undertook his first Ankoku Butoh performance, Kinjiki, in 1959, using a novel by Yukio Mishima as the raw input material for an abrupt, sexually-inflected act of choreographic violence which stunned its audience.

At around that time, Hijikata met three figures who would be crucial collaborators for his future work: Yukio Mishima, Eikoh Hosoe, and Donald Richie.

In 1962, he and his partner Motofuji Akiko established a dance studio, Asbestos Hall,[5] in the Meguro district of Tokyo, which would be the base for his choreographic work for the rest of his life; a shifting company of young dancers gathered around him there.

Inspired by the criminality of the French novelist Jean Genet, Hijikata wrote manifestoes of his emergent dance form with such as titles as 'To Prison[6]'.

Many of his early works were inspired by figures of European literature such as the Marquis de Sade[7] and the Comte de Lautréamont,[8] 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.

[9] Especially at the end of the 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Hijikata undertook collaborations with filmmakers, photographers, urban architects and visual artists as an essential element of his approach to choreography's intersections with other art forms.

Throughout the period in which he had performed in public, Hijikata's work had been perceived as scandalous and the object of revulsion, part of a 'dirty avant-garde[15]' which refused to assimilate itself to Japanese traditional art, power or society.

Hijikata's period of seclusion and silence in the Asbestos Hall allowed him to mesh his Ankoku Butoh preoccupations with his memories of childhood in northern Japan, one result of which was the publication of a hybrid book-length text on memory and corporeal transformation, entitled Ailing Dancer[17] (1983); he also compiled scrapbooks in which he annotated art-images cut from magazines with fragmentary reflections on corporeality and dance.