In his as-yet-untranslated 2005 book, Geijutsu Kigyo Ron ("The Theory of Art Entrepreneurship"), Murakami attributes his spectacular international success to his business management skills and his strategic appraisal of the position of Japanese art in the Western art market. "You cannot create an art piece unless you know how to make and sell it," he writes. Elsewhere, he sums up his position with uncanny concision: "Art is the supreme incarnation of luxury entertainment."

Murakami's art education started out along fairly conventional lines. He studied nihonga painting, a Japanese style that emerged in the 19^th century in reaction to Western influences, and briefly tried his hand at anime. In the early 1990s, while finishing his Ph.D. at Tokyo National University, he set his sights on a career as a contemporary artist. His first successful works borrowed from otaku, the geeky male subculture of sci-fi anime, manga, and video games with an obsessive, pedophilic edge. In works like Miss ko2 (pronounced ko-ko), he borrowed otaku stereotypes—in this case, a leggy, bubble-eyed supervixen dolled up like a 1950s drive-in waitress—and rendered them as larger-than-life-size fiberglass sculptures. Hypersexual, garish, and slick, these oversized figurines owe a lot to Jeff Koons' sculptural enlargements of American kitsch icons like Michael Jackson and his pet chimp, Bubbles.