Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700-1820

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.

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.