Though there has been much scholarly research of the ukiyo-e, woodblock prints from premodern Japan, one sizable genre within this field has been notoriously neglected. This is the "shunga," the so-called spring pictures that were always erotic and, as this seminal study proves, often pornographic as well.
These prints were intended to arouse, and the author's reasons for believing this are irrefutable. Among them is that their major appearance coincides with the massive urbanization of Japan beginning in the 17th century.
The cities were demographically artificial, none more so than Edo. It was two-thirds male, and Saikaku called it a "city of bachelors": a million people, few of whom had been born there. At the same time the city was severely disciplined and not many could afford what pleasure quarters there were.
Shunga thus filled a need. They were, as the author says, "cheap, stainable and disposable." Yet this major use has never before been thoroughly investigated. Instead, a number of uses have been offered: fire prevention, sex education for brides, worn under armor for protection. Yet such excuses cannot account for the vast number and enormous popularity of these prints.
One of the reasons is that they could be used in place of a visit to the prostitute. A print, even a richly colored one, "cost about the price of a cheap meal out," many, many times less than even the most modest streetwalker, to say nothing of the ludicrously expensive "oiran."
Print in hand, the purchaser could be assured of roughly the same experience as that of the more leisured and the more monied. Shunga were to be enjoyed, as a current saying had it, with one hand.
Though this conclusion is inescapable, the number of commentators who have missed it it is truly remarkable. Only several -- Richard Lane, Sumie Jones, Howard Hibbett, and a few others -- have examined premodern Japanese sexuality with any degree of precision. The purpose of the shunga had not really been revealed until this book.
It is thus analogous to Kenneth Clarke's monumental 1956 study, "The Nude," in which he was the first scholar honest enough to state that the purposes behind the naked figure were at least as lubricious as they were idealistic. Timon Screech, in this equally monumental study of the shunga, honestly reveals its social relevance.
A frank depiction of genitalia is therefore necessary, but there are other reasons as well. As the author tells us, "the Western genre of the nude downplays the genitals. With so much erotic power inherent in the secondary sexual characteristics, it can afford to." But the people in Japanese prints have few secondary sexual characteristics (though their clothing may have some) and there is "not much else of a bodily kind for shunga to show."
This is perhaps one of the reasons for their magnification -- a much remarked-upon phenomenon. But there are others, too.
Remarkable equipment is discovered upon only some of the cast. Something more realistic is found on those much younger or older. "Shunga abets the fantasy of the adult male who wishes to imagine himself larger than a youth to compensate for the latter's greater potency and stamina and also still safely distanced from dotage."
Women are sometimes outsized as well, but this the author sees as further evidence of the curious egalitarianism of the shunga. Not only do men and women look alike, but they also act alike.
One of the hallmarks of the shunga (at least until the end of the Tokugawa Period) is the amount of pleasure that the couple finds in each other -- equivalent certainly to that which the viewer finds in him or herself.
Not that the viewer was to use shunga as any sort of model. Contemporary "senryu" indicate that spring-pictures were to be viewed rather than emulated. "The stupid couple/ Try doing it as in shunga/And sprain their hands," While another couple, "Going all out/ To copy shunga/ They get muscle spasms."
With concern, proportion, wit and a bit of levity, the author of this authoritative and invaluable contribution to scholarship has given us the book for which we have long waited.
As he observes: "The barrier modern scholarship has so studiously erected between shunga and 'normal' pictures has long hid the fact that the work is libidinous," that "once the tension of sexual encounter (thwarted, pending or consummated) is removed, the whole genre grows flaccid." In his hands the shunga tradition stands strong, straight and proud once more.
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