Iwami Furusawa was born in 1912 in Miyaki (Saga Prefecture, Kyushu). In 1927, he left Kurume Commercial High School and moved to Daegu (Korea) to work at the shop of his uncle. The following year, Furusawa returned to Japan and studied painting under Saburosuke Okada (1869-1939). Since 1936, he published Mangas under the pseudonym of Bonsuke Noro. He founded Bijutsu Bunka Art Association with Ichiro Fukuzawa and Saburo Aso in 1939. In 1943, he was drafted into the military and sent to China, where he became a prisoner of war. He was released in 1946. Those experiences led to works such as “Twilight” of 1947, and the 1956 large-scale work “Heisotsu.”

Furusawa later established himself as a foremost proponent of surrealism in Japan. From 1949 to 1963, he regularly exhibited at the Japanese Independent Art Exhibition. He left the Bijutsu Bunka Art Association, which he co-founded, in 1954. While one portion of his work is inspired by the mythology of the Kojiki and other Japanese classics, he also gained a reputation for his nude drawings and as an illustrator of books. Over the course of his career, he produced more than 300 woodcut prints, copperplates, and lithographs. In 1975, the Iwami Furusawa Museum opened in Yatsushiro (Yamanashi). Furusawa died in 2000, aged 88.