From the late 1970s until his death in 1999, Sadao Hasegawa was one of postwar Japan’s most prominent illustrators, and a major figure in the country’s burgeoning industry of gay magazines. This collaboration with Tokyo’s Gallery Naruyama—which has handled his estate since his suicide—is Hasegawa’s first solo show outside Japan: although his paintings and drawings were reproduced in magazines in the US, UK, and Australia, his concern that their erotic content would land him in trouble with Japanese customs prevented him from shipping them to arts institutions overseas. Suggestively titled after the corporate letterhead of paper on which he sketched, it presents a focused selection of works in a vitrine and on the walls of one small room, consisting mainly of designs for magazine prints—some of which still have their marked-up overlays. In a 1995 letter from Hasegawa to Durk Dehner, founder of the Tom of Finland Foundation, he articulated, in English, an intention of using mainly Asian “motifs” to create a “universe of beauty” that “differs from [the] Western point of view.” This utopian project sums up the show’s focus, part of which involves Hasegawa assaying the politics of queer miscegenation between East and West. A preparatory drawing for …