Customer Reviews

Shunga: The Essence of Japanese Pillow-Book Eroticism (Essence of Erotica series)

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- so let's start there. Every page has at least one full-color reproduction of, well, reproduction or something related. The colors and printing are good. The author has also presented some notes of cultural explanation, and a few bawdy stories. The pictures don't seem to be hand-picked for their aptness to the story they embellish, but keep up the enjoyable mood of the book.

For all that, I found parts of this book disappointing. None of the pictures is labelled with artist or even era. I can't hunt down more of the work that I liked, or see if stylistic similarities point to some artist or time. Also, some of the pictures are quite small, as if the shunga itself was of secondary interest to the text. The stories, too, are cut loose from attribution - the author could have made them up for all I know. That's not a possibility I take seriously, but it was disappointing to lose all trace of historical context for the stories, too. For some odd reason, the last section of the book is quite unrelated to shunga. It's nice material, from lady Murasaki's diary, and nicely illustrated. It's just not shunga, though - remember what this book was called?

The pictures are enjoyable, and show some variety in practices and poses. I was hoping for more, though, more information about the images and their creators, and more about the history shown. As much as I like the pictures, I'm still looking for real information about these lovely prints, the people who made them, and the times in which they arose.

//wiredweird

Shunga scrolls from the 12th to the 18th centuries are the famous Japanese erotic pillow books and were comprised of illustrations as well as erotic poems, stories and legends, but the most important function of Shunga was to provide sex advice. The Japanese adopted the idea of the books from the Chinese. The nobles and moneyed classes used the pillow books as sex manuals and carefully followed the advice they contained for increasing sexual pleasure and for increasing over-all longevity.
Most people familiar with Shunga are primarily thinking of the beautiful erotic, some westerners would say pornographic, wood block prints by the most famous artists of Japanese history. Modern painters, such as Pablo Picasso were so impressed with Shunga art that his infamous 347 Series of etchings was inspired by the Japanese art form. It's helpful to understanding Shunga if the reader realizes that the Japanese culture never associated "guilt" with sex and throughout the country's history, sex and sexual experimentation has been s normal and important part of everyday life. Shunga books were often given as wedding gifts to new brides. They were the marriage and sex manuals of the era.
Bret Norton, the book's author spent forty years working in the Far East. He was an avid scholar of the various countries languages and cultures. This lavishly illustrated book is one of a series of four that Norton released including "The Kama Sutra," "The Golden Lotus," and "Eastern Erotica."
What makes this book different than many other books about Shunga is that it includes a selection of the ancient stories; legends and diary entries that accompanied the illustrations included in the scrolls and later, actual books. Many of the stories are filled with "Dosojin" or gods of the roadways and pathways. Demons, often in the form of animals, embellished stories with names such as "The Cold Fish," "Like a Bamboo Shoot," "The Bonze Ferryman," " The Doll Festival," and "Death by Perfume" provides a wealth of different and sometimes humorous peeks into the Japanese society of the time. The stories are filled with lessons about the need to please your sexual partner, how to behave in polite society, jealous women taking revenge for unforgivable chauvinistic behavior, but most importantly, the books were read and studied and followed religiously for their health and longevity advice. This collection of various samples of Shunga stories is like an anthology of the "best of the art form." The material is charming, straightforward and amazing. It wets the appetite for more.
The author also includes an interesting segment from the "Diary of Lady Muraski" which really isn't Shunga, but does show how the culture of that historical era functioned. It provides an important clue as to why Shunga art and writing would be so important in the formal, educated, stratified society of the period. One of the few weaknesses in the book is that most of the beautiful color reproductions seem unrelated to the "Lady Muraski's Diary" part of the book. That's not a big drawback however, because the segment wonderfully illustrates the highly refined culture of the Japanese royal court.
It's amazing how something as openly sexual as Shunga could be such a common part of Japanese culture for centuries. The sheer volume of surviving examples of Shunga bears witness to its almost universal distribution throughout all corners of Japan.

As an artist researching this subject, the art is quite good, and numerous examples of different styles are included in this book. What is confusing is that the text does not fit the art. Although enjoyable in their own right, if I wanted written Japanese erotica I would have sought that exclusively.

Almost offensively useless. Typos all over the place - and the best of all - confusion for Confucian! The texts are fairy tale type fables, totally unconnected with the prints, which are unidentified and undated, presented in an unsystematic hodge podge.

The author claims to have identified erotic literature dating from 5000 years ago. Pre Shang dynasty! What literature is that?