A coffee-table collection of a fascinating tradition in Japanese art.
This is a lush coffee table art book comprising a survey of Ukiyo-e poster art, which was a genre of Japanese wood block prints of the ancient Edo period (1600-1867) that continue to inspire and inform creators of Japanese manga and anime. Decadence focuses on shunga prints, or Japanese erotica. Shunga was designed to titillate, depicting a range of traditional themes such as exotic Asian beauties in intimate, pin-up poses and dramatic couplings with fierce warriors wielding enormous "swords," macabre supernatural lovers, and bestial animals and monsters.
Many of the most historically and aesthetically significant artists of the genre are represented, including Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, Kachoyojo Azumagenji, Toyohara Kunichika, Yoshiiku, and Hokusai, among others.
Modern artists through the 1990s who have been influenced or inspired by Ukiyo-e imagery are also represented, such as the Japanese underground cartoonist Suehiro Maruo, who in 1988 recreated Ukiyo-e theatre posters about a kubuki drama called 28 Murders in a manga format using current famous murderers; the tattoo artist Horiyoshi the Third; the contemporary pin-up photographer Nobuyushi Aruki; Ultraman creator Eiji Usuburaya, whose B-movie scenarios are reminiscent of kabuki plots and Ukiyo-e images; Nagisa Oshima's film In the Realm of the Senses; and others.
The color and black-and-white Ukiyo-e images may surprise Western eyes, with their highly decorative realism, attention to detail, exaggerated sexual genitalia, and almost Cubist (before Cubism) multiple perspectives, giving them a surreal, vivid, and disorienting quality. Proving the universality of fetishism and sexual fantasies, this erotic guide serves to bridge the ancient and the modern, providing a glimpse into by-gone pleasures and pleasure districts and their influences on contemporary Japanese popular culture and erotic literature.

This is the first modern study on Japanese erotic print art (so called shunga), illustrating a large selection of the best works mainly from private collections in Europe and the USA.
The publication shows highlights from the oeuvre of Kitagawa Utamaro, Katsushika Hokusai, Suzuki Harunobu, Utagawa Kunisada, Utagawa Kuniyoshi and many others. It outlines the artistic developments from the early period to the end of the 19th century when western themes began to appear in Japanese erotic art. Various essays written by international experts describe this fascinating genre in its social, historical and artistic context, discussing themes like homosexuality, voyeurism, life in Edo's brothels, techniques of composition, etc.

Shunga, or "images of spring," are erotic polychrome engravings painted by the masters of the Japanese Ukiyo-e school during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. The shunga served as illustrations for love novels, instructive albums for young wives, and even lucky charms for warriors.

This book is the first to present a special collection of rare, previously unpublished prints, enriched by texts that introduce the various periods and defining characteristics of the genre. Unabashed and exquisitely rendered, these images are a surprising accessible visual chronicle of erotic fine art.

Sex and the Floating World offers an entirely new assessment of the genre of Japanese paintings and prints known as shunga. Recent changes in Japanese law have at last enabled erotic images to be published without fear of prosecution, and many picture-books have since appeared in Japan. There has, however, been very little attempt to situate shunga imagery within the contexts of sexuality, gender, or the politics of power. Questions of aesthetics, and of whether shunga deserves a place in the canon of Japanese art history, have dominated, and the issue of how such images were used has been avoided. Timon Screech seeks to re-establish shunga in its proper historical contexts of culture and creativity.
Shunga prints are unusual in that they are overtly about sex. Once we begin to examine them first and foremost as sexual aids, we must be prepared for some shocks. In Sex and the Floating World, the author takes us into the strange world of sexual fantasy in Edo-period Japan, investigating the tensions in class and gender experienced by those who made - and made use of - shunga.

Presenting the best of the Shunga scrolls from the 12th to the 18th centuries, this guide goes back to one of the earliest sources of erotic literature to uncover ancient lessons for achieving sexual pleasure. Shunga, the famous Japanese erotic pillow books, were written and illustrated in Japan during the period of the Shogunate and the Samurai. During this period, masculine characteristics were prominent in the figure of the Samurai warrior, while the famous Geishas, women who were talented in the arts, embodied feminine characteristics. It was during this period that the Japanese noble and moneyed classes could put into practice everything they learned in the pillow books, and pleasure districts thrived. Originally written on scrolls, the Shunga offered erotic poems and stories as well as sex advice.

This publication offers the reader a ravishing selection of erotic prints ("shunga") by the first full-color woodblock-print masters: Suzuki Harunobu (c. 1725-70) and Isoda Koryûsai (act. c. 1764-88). It is based on a private collection of prints of remarkable quality, their radiant colors perfectly preserved by the albums in which they were kept.
The first volume in a popular series on erotic prints by famous Japanese woodblock-print artists, this book contains a detailed general introduction to the genre of "shunga". In addition to a description of the historical and cultural settings of the prints, it focuses in particular on the locations and interiors where the erotic action takes place.

A courtesan's day in the carefree atmosphere of the famous pleasure quarter the Yoshiwara in Edo (present-day Tokyo) was carefully planned to an hourly schedule. This sequence of twelve and later twenty-four hours proved a convenient device for Japanese print artists and their publishers when devising sets of prints showing favorite beauties of the day engaged in daily activities.
This volume presents three prints series on the same theme produced over the course of a century. Besides being an obvious aid to collectors of these sets, it also provides a fascinating insight into the world of the female entertainer in Edo, and later Tokyo.
The book opens with Cecilia Seigle's comprehensive introduction to life in this highly structured and tightly controlled pleasure quarter, offering insights into the often hard and occasionally glamorous life of the courtesan in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Edo.
The first series treated here, Utamaro's famous 'Twelve Hours in Yoshiwara' (Seirô jûni toki tsuzuki), Tim Clark, Keeper of Japanese Antiquities at the British Museum, shows c. 1794, in all its glory with descriptions.
We then leap forward in time to the Meiji period when the status of women in Japanese society, and particularly those in the Yoshiwara, underwent substantial change. Alfred Marks discusses Yoshitoshi's set 'Twenty-four hours in Shinbashi and Yanagibashi' (Shinryû nijûshi toki), 1880, with translations of the copious textual information on the prints.
Amy Newland concludes by examining Toyohara Kunichika's interpretation of the theme of 'twenty-four hours' as represented in his set 'The scenes of the twenty-four hours parodied' (Mitate chûya nijûyoji no uchi), 1890.