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28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a provocative book from a creative scholar..., June 3, 2001
This review is from: Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700-1820 (Paperback)
Vast numbers of people are already familiar with "shunga," the Edo-period erotic art that is the subject of Timon Screech's "Sex and the Floating World." Few readers, however, will have focused on learning about the context in which this erotic art was produced. Moreover, some of Screech's findings will undoubtedly come as a surprise. Chief among the book's arguments is that the culture of urban Edo which produced the "shunga" was not one of "laxity and freedom, sexual or other." Rather, Screech says, the art served the needs of "auto-eroticism" for a city (Edo, now Tokyo) that, because of political requirements, was overwhelmingly populated by males who had been separated from their families and denied access to females. Screech's book stands in stark contrast to the many previous volumes on "shunga" that have concentrated on reproducing the erotic prints, and the total space devoted to visual images is rather limited. Still many readers will find this book rewarding, and however iconoclastic some of the findings may be no serious student of Japanese art or early modern history will want to be without it.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
What a fun read., February 3, 2005
Can a scholarly work be a fun read? Definitely. Screech advances some rather different thoughts on not only shunga but ukioyo-e prints in general that should leave you thinking. Yet, as firm as Screech's views are and as consistently as he advances them throughout the book, they do not overbear. Thinking through his points and exploring the images offered takes on into new and intriguing territory. It is a fun trip.
The writing suffers from some occasionally very tortured passages. The lack of an index and any sort of cross referencing of the illustrations is a significant detraction. Neither of these is enough to counsel against the book, but are frustrating on occassion.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
If You Also Wonder What Japanese Did With Them, November 2, 2011
There are larger collections of erotic Japanese pictures usually known as Shunga, literally "spring-prints," but this pays more attention to their relationship to Edo period sexuality, including what the first chapter-heading states plainly "their use." True, they might be used for sex manuals for newly-weds, to keep one safe in battle or keep away fire, moths and silverfish, etc, but, in most cases, they were used for the obvious thing: masturbation. Screech goes into that using evidence from senryu and literature and both the academic press and scholar are to be congratulated for tackling such a sticky subject. Besides "use" (maybe 20% of the total), Screech puts the images into socio-historical space and time while zooming in on symbols without which the subtle pleasure of the pictures might be missed, explores "the scoptic regimes of shunga," that is, the way people looked at others and/or were looked at -- there is much looking going on within the pictures -- and even gives a good overview of devices for looking, the technology of the time. All in all, the book is a real read and full of ideas mostly expressed in terms understandable by lay readers while offering not a few good uncensored prints, a fine selection, and always in context.
This does not mean the edition I read was perfect. A shunga showing a man masturbating at = his spending seems headed right for her kimonoed body = a portrait of a beauty (a woman with a beautiful face), that does not actually prove that men used pornographic prints but that they, or we (I am one)can arouse ourselves without even seeing bodies lacked what I would consider an important point. It was also a visual pun on aimed-masturbation (atezuri, a term not properly defined elsewhere) which meant that focused on a particular person, typically as a substitute for sex, i.e., for men saving themselves (not wasting money and risking disease) while biding one's time to get married to the target. My reading, based upon reading hundreds of thousands of dirty senryu re this and some other items, may be in found in the latest reprint of Sex and the Floating World (a year or two ago), as the author wrote he incorporated some of my criticism and cites my work.
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