TADANORI YOKOO — The Ballad to a Severed Little Finger, Postcard, XARAVEL, 1966

Postcard after Tadanori Yokoo, The Ballad to a Severed Little Finger, 1966. Published by XARAVEL Co., Ltd., Kyoto, after the Yakuza Shobo Publishers silkscreen. 10.5 × 15 cm. Colour offset on card stock; printed recto; caption and publisher details to verso.

Originally produced in the context of Yakuza Shobo, The Ballad to a Severed Little Finger belongs to Yokoo’s charged early graphic language: cinema, violence, theatre, folklore, advertising, and postwar Japanese visual culture compressed into a single printed field. The image layers a tattooed male figure, a blue hand, wave forms, portrait medallions, blood-drop motifs, and dense Japanese text into a composition that operates simultaneously as poster, film advertisement, and graphic proposition.

This object is not the 1966 silkscreen. It is its later portable support. The image is reduced, captioned, and redistributed through XARAVEL as postcard — artist, title, publisher, year, size, medium printed to verso. What was once poster-scale becomes mailable, collectible, and administratively legible.

The interest is in the transfer. A major image passes into a minor format. The work moves from exhibition and poster culture into postcard circulation, where authorship, publishing, ownership, and display are quietly reorganised. The postcard does not replace the original; it records another stage of its public life.

Scarce as a Yokoo/XARAVEL postcard; a strong specialist object within Japanese graphic design, artist postcard, and printed ephemera contexts.

Condition: Good vintage condition. Light surface marks, faint age toning, and minor handling wear to verso. Clean image side.