Customer Reviews

Erotic art of Japan: The pillow poem = [Utamakura]

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This collection allies nearly thirty extracts from Japan's long bawdy literature with dozens of erotic prints from, generally from the 17th and 18th centuties.

The images are wonderful, often familiar to any reader who knows shunga as a genre or who knows the ouvre famous Japanese printmakers. The book's oversized format allows many of the images to be reproducded large enough for their detail to be enjoyed. True to the shunga tradition, couples are shown clearly coupled, often via organs exaggerated in stylized manner. Couples' poses and visual style cover a wide range, but always depict happy, consensual play, a pleasant difference from so much of Western erotic imagery. Because social bath-house nudity was common, rich clothes and environs conveyed sensuality where mere undress could not. Unfortunately, black and white reproductions lose much of the visual richness of these color prints. Even where color appears in this book, it often suffers from 1970s or early-80s printing technology or from subseqent aging of the book itself. It's enjoyable, but more recent collections of shunga are more enjoyable.

The anthology of bawdy and sexually oriented vignettes distinguish this collection. Saikaku's ribaldry appears, including selections from his "Five Women who Loved Love." His writing is readily available in English translation, though. This collection's gems are from writers I hadn't heard of: Suikyoan, Fusuishi, and others. Serious love poems and moral essays round out the collection. I found one maddening defect in the text, though: weak attribution of the original sources reproduced, often skipping even the era of publication. Any reader hoping to seek out other traditional works based on this book's content will understand my disappointment. Outside of that, it's a helpful collection of cultural, often humorous writing.

Although both appear throughout the book, text and images rarely relate to each other except concidentally. In a few enlightening cases, we see famous illustrations embedded in the stories that they illustrate. Vice versa, other cases provide English translations of calligraphy in the original prints. Again, this English edition of a French book displays at least one more annoying omission. Page 258 displays a baffling image by Hokusai, one filled with calligraphy. Despite the caption's promise of help on "the preceding page," the translation is missing, leaving the English-language reader tantalized.

These are quibbles, though. This will make a great addition to any shelf of traditional Eastern erotica. It shouldn't be your first book, or even your second, but the serious reader will find much to enjoy.

-- wiredweird