Interpreting Shunga scroll: sex and desire between women in Edo’s ‘floating world’

Popular during Japan’s Edo period (1600–1868), erotic shunga (春画; literally ‘spring’ pictures) served a range of purposes, from art and entertainment to self-pleasure aids and sex-educational material for young couples. As a subgenre of ukiyo-e, the art form encompassed a broad thematic scope spanning the sexual idealisation of life in Japan’s urban centres and imagined scenes from history and literature. Though officially restricted by Edo’s ruling Tokugawa shogunate, shunga served as a lucrative form of creative output for many of ukiyo-e’s best known artists, from Katsushika Hokusai to Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Despite its prolificity, shunga has remained an outlier in the study and exhibition of ukiyo-e until recent decades, where it has increasingly been the subject of academic interest and institutional collecting internationally.¹Major recent presentations include the British Museum’s landmark exhibition and catalogue of significant new scholarship on shunga in 2013; an exhibition series at the Honolulu museum of art (2012, 2013, 2014) and the first exhibition of shunga in Japan at the Eisei Bunko museum in 2015. Within these contexts, shunga is frequently touted as an important window into the complex sexual and social norms and fantasies of Edo’s ‘floating world’;²Here, ‘floating world’ (‘ukiyo’) is a complex term associated with the changing urban lifestyle of Edo-period society. A newly powerful merchant class engaged in activities across the pleasure quarter, and entertainment districts, theatre and teahouses. This ephemeral third space was the subject and setting of many ukiyo-e prints and paintings. free from prudish Western connotations of ‘pornography’, and a platform for the visual representation of female sexual pleasure, homosexual desire and the fluid expression and performance of gender. Despite these claims and the renewed interest in the art form, very little has been said about the representation of sex and desire between women in shunga. This speculative discussion considers an image in the NGV’s recently acquired Shunga scroll, 1840s –70s, and seeks to understand the intended audience for this work and shunga representing sexual desire between women more broadly, that is, the extent to which these images were produced either for, or as an open acknowledgement of, desire between women versus the imagined heterosexual gaze of male consumers. Important shunga conventions, contemporaneous literary references, and the historical context of shifting sexual and gender norms during the late Edo (1615–1868) and early Meiji (1868–1912) periods are discussed in tandem.

Examining the NGV’s Shunga scroll

Taking its title from ‘spring’ as a euphemism for sex, shunga flourished as a subgenre of ukiyo-e painting during the Edo period (1603–1867), though earlier examples of narrative works centred on sexual themes date back to the late Heian (794–1185) and early Muromachi (1336–1573) eras.³See Akiko Yano, Shunga paintings before the floating world for a discussion of pre-Edo examples and Aki Ishigami’s Chinese Chunhua and Japanese shunga for a discussion of the influence of early Chinese sex manuals on Japanese erotic art, both in T. Clark, C. A. Gerstle, A Ishigami & A. Yano, Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art, British Museum Press, London, 2013. Aided by concurrent Edo-period advancements in printing technology, thousands of popular shunga designs were mass-produced and widely distributed by merchants and through itinerant lending libraries.⁴Monta Hayakawa, ‘Who were the audiences for “shunga”?’ Japan Review, Nichibunken, no. 26, 2013, p. 17. Multi-sheet albums offering depictions of a variety of explicit sexual encounters were a popular format and a shrewd commercial strategy that increased the novelty-value of offerings while simultaneously maintaining their appeal across a broad cross-section of Edo society and individual preferences.⁵Timothy Clark & Andrew Gerstle, ‘What was shunga?’, Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art, British Museum Press, London, 2013. p. 21. Shunga also took the form of painted scrolls, which could be commissioned to include specific scenes, or themes, requested by a patron.

Neither the artist nor original owner of Shunga scroll, purchased by the NGV in 2020, had been identified at the time of this discussion. Dated to sometime between the 1840s and 1870s, the hand-painted scroll shows signs of wear and creasing consistent with age and repeated (perhaps hasty) opening and closing without careful tensioning of the paper. The work features six diverse erotic scenes involving individuals of various social rank and role. Among graphic tableaux of members of the noble class, townspeople and monks, two women appear to be engaged in a physical encounter concealed by their voluminous robes. The dynamic is ambiguous. One individual is larger than the other – a ukiyo-e convention often employed to symbolise comparatively greater age or status – and embraces her companion’s shoulders while tightly clasping their hand. Eye contact is direct, and rouged cheeks are a hair’s-breath apart. The smaller of the two figures holds the other’s elbow. It is unclear whether the larger figure’s concealed hand is being guided – or urged to stop. Socked feet, clenched, dangle mid-air. The burning brazier and pair of cups sitting forgotten beside the futon alongside an array of accoutrements indicate that the initial encounter was planned, though it seems impossible to know whether the interaction is one of consent, mutual desire, or the forceful coercion by one physically, or socially, dominant individual of another. Often shunga were accompanied by esoteric poems or humorous inscriptions to assist in the interpretation of scenes, yet this example is absent of any text. A close examination of the interior setting and material surrounding the two figures offers few clues. No images are discernible on the paper beside them. A furoshiki-wrapped package sits unopened, while an inro, a small portable case worn at the waist of kimono – often by men of status – may have held any manner of small objects, herbal medicines or aphrodisiacs. The blue bird on the maple-bough screen behind the two figures watches on with voyeuristic intrigue.

Though thousands of shunga designs were produced, representations of sex between women are comparatively rare. Lasting known examples are in the tens, and tend to exist as single scenes in albums or scrolls representing an array of different couples in unrelated sexual unions. While historical shunga albums and scrolls of sex between men exist, none exclusively representing sex between women could be identified. If this assessment is accurate, it is impossible to state whether none were produced, or they simply no longer exist. Though the existence of shunga depicting sex between women is widely acknowledged by art historians and curators, remarkably little has actually been said about this material or desire between women in Edo culture more generally, despite shunga’s resurgence in academic research and the museum, and the concurrent movement towards queering the historical archive.

Before proceeding with this discussion, it is important to note several fundamental contentions. Translation between Japanese and English scholarship is an imperfect practice that risks the loss of precise meaning and nuance. As Junko Saeki has stressed, terms like ‘love’ and ‘homosexuality’ used in English scholarship are often ‘loaded with cultural discourse’ not necessarily present in their Japanese counterparts; similarly, historical Japanese terms often embody complex valences that do not translate neatly into English vocabulary.⁶See Junko Saeki, in S. Junko & I. Levy, ‘From Iro (Eros) to Ai=Love: the case of Tsubouchi Shōyō’, Review of Japanese Culture and Society, 20, 2008, pp. 71–98; Junko Saeki, ‘Academic news’, Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal, v. 6, no. 1, summer 1997, 1997, pp. 37, , date accessed 6 Mar. 2022. Though terminology is treated cautiously, this discussion relies on English-based resources, including Japanese scholarship translated into English by native speakers of both English and Japanese. Similarly, the limited availability of historical sources risks layering meaning upon the tenuous, and by no means can all experiences be accounted for. Acknowledging these limitations, what can be understood about the NGV’s Shunga scroll, and the small body of shunga representing sex and desire between women more broadly?

Artists and audiences

With the possible exception of Katsushika Oi, daughter and artistic collaborator of Katsushika Hokusai, all known, recorded shunga artists working during the Edo period were men. Within this gendered mode of production, there can be little doubt that male gaze and fantasy were guiding elements in the composition of shunga. It is tempting to evaluate existing examples accordingly. Male genitals were frequently rendered with comical exaggeration and served as the central focus of works – though the equal scale of head and penis has also been described as symbolising the ‘equal importance’ or ‘inseparability’ of one’s public and private lives.⁷Monta Hayakawa, in Rosina Buckland, Shunga: Erotic Art in Japan, Overlook Press, New York, 2013. p. 50. In contrast, women are often shown demonstrating near 360-degree range of hip motion whilst contorting into implausible positions. The humorous quality of these scenes, also known as ‘warai-e’ (laughing pictures) is sometimes acknowledged or emphasised in an accompanying inscription. To quote one artist: ‘The foolish couple copy shunga and pull a muscle’.⁸ibid. Of the comparatively few known examples of female intercourse in shunga, almost all are highly theatrical and graphically explicit in comparison to the NGV’s example. Breasts are often exposed, and sexual organs drip with caricatured arousal. Images also frequently involve a harigata or tagaigata, dildo-like instruments carved from horn or tortoiseshell (below).

In large part, Edo society was divided between public and private spheres and Shogun-dictated obligations meant that men and women were often separated for extended periods. A prevailing interpretation of these sexual implements seems to be that, sequestered away to inner chambers and rendered abstinent by circumstance, women had little option but to engage in self or mutual pleasuring, and were even encouraged to do so for health benefits. A curatorial note accompanying a shunga album in the British Museum offers the following explanation for the depiction of harigata:

When two women were playing together [the harigata] was worn around the hips: when one woman was enjoying it alone, she tied it to her ankle. Here the woman wearing the dildo holds a shell-shaped container holding some kind of cream. [The inscription] says, ‘Seeing as we’re going to do it like this, I’ll put lots of the cream on it. So really make yourself come. Without the cream this big one would not go in.’ … The other woman puts a hand up to the dildo and urges her friend, ‘Hurry up and put it in. I want to come. I want to come five or six times without stopping’. This is not strictly speaking a lesbian encounter. In the Edo period it was widely believed that dildos were used by ladies-in-waiting in the women’s quarters of samurai mansions. They were necessary because this was a world without men, rather than being an expression of affective love between women. But were dildos really in widespread use among ladies-in-waiting in the Edo period? Surely this is, rather, ‘the world of the lady-in-waiting as imagined by common townspeople’.⁹The British Museum, Object: Fumi no kiyogaki 婦美の清書き (Neat Version of a Love Letter (or Pure Drawings of Female Beauty) (Neat Version of a Love Letter (or Pure Drawings of Female Beauty)), , date accessed 6 Mar. 2022.

Alternative sources suggest that harigata were in fact ‘openly marketed’ on a flourishing market alongside tagaigata, double-ended masturbatory aids designed for use by two women ‘sometimes sold under a label with a contrived character consisting of two radicals for ‘female’.¹⁰See Sasama and Beurdeley et al., both cited in Gary Leupp, Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995, p. 189. In the floating world of shunga, however, sex between women was not limited to traditional instruments. One example, c. 1830, an egoyomi (small calendar print) attributed to Keisai Eisen (1790–1848) shows a woman penetrating her partner with a tengu mask, an Edo noh theatre accessory representing a mischievous goblin-like character with a large phallic nose (below).¹¹Historically, tengu were mythological creatures who appeared in the noh theatre as a masked character representing a mountain priest and master of combative arts. In a rare example of shunga entering contemporary public discourse, the image went viral when shared by the Whores of Yore twitter account in 2018, resulting in the informal adoption of the tengu emoji as an ideogram for the strap-on dildo.¹²Dr Kate Lister initiated the Whores of Yore project in 2016. The archive provides a platform for academics, activists, sex workers, and archivists to recentre the historical and cultural significance of sex workers throughout history.

In another well-known Hokusai example from the 1810s, two female awabi (abalone) divers masturbate using a sea cucumber. Joshua Mostow highlights shunga’s phallocentric nature as evidence of ‘absolute blindness to the possibility of female-homoerotic pleasure’.¹³J. S. Mostow, ‘The gender of wakashu and the grammar of desire’, in Norman Bryson, Maribeth Graybill & Joshua S. Mostow (eds), Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field, University of Hawaiʻi Press, United Kingdom, 2003, p. 69. Similarly, feminist responses to work of this nature include that ‘men may find it easier to accept, or may even find it titillating, if women have sex using an instrument resembling their own genitals’, and that the ‘masculine presence in all-female shunga … (indicates) that there is no evidence of Tokugawa lesbianism’.¹⁴Ueno and Leupp, in Saskia Wieringa, ‘Silence, Sin, and the System: Women’s Same-Sex Practices in Japan’, in Evelyn Blackwood, Saskia E. Wieringa & Abha Bhaiya, Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2007, p. 34. Hitomi Tonomura similarly suggests that in shunga ‘the sexual experiences of women [are shown as] limited, singular, and dependent on men’.¹⁵Hitomi Tonomura, in Mostow p. 69. Artists’ motivations aside, these arguments offer a non-inclusive reading in the context of contemporary queer discourse; the use of dildos and other phallic implements are often used in queer or lesbian sex where there is no masculine desire present whatsoever. In examples where penetration is integral to the composition, female genitals are often represented as ‘enlarged and dripping’, which Saskia Wieringa suggests is a clear indication of autonomous sexual desire between women.¹⁶Wieringa p. 34.

Though relevant within the broader context of audiences for female sex in shunga, these discussions offer little assistance in interpreting the Shunga scroll, which is unlike any other known example of sex between women. The work does not include any visible penetration, though it could be speculated that the furoshki-wrapped box next to the bed contains a harigata or related implement. Though there is no overt evidence of masculine presence, the protagonists are not alone. The blue bird peering forward from the screen behind them indicates an element of uninvited voyeurism, a frequently occurring theme in shunga (below).

But to what extent were women part of the audience for shunga? On a practical level, the women of the traditional Edo household would have been the first to receive home deliveries of shunga, so it can be assumed that the material was known, and to an extent, accessible to women.¹⁷Hayakawa, p. 19. In addition to the many meta shunga examples depicting women viewing shunga, literary examples suggest that shunga was enjoyed by women of the Edo noble class and their employees. In the popular stage play Chūshingura, a merchant attempts to discourage suspected police from opening a crate of weapons by claiming that ‘[t]his box contains personal articles ordered by the wife of a certain daimyo, including pornographic books … Her name is written on each article, even on the order for the erotic materials. If you open the box you will be exposing to public view the name of a great family’.¹⁸Leupp, p. 191. In two senryu poems contemporaneous with the NGV’s example:¹⁹Hayakawa p. 21.

On her wedding day

The princess-bride, for the first time,

Breaks the seal on the shunga wrapper.

– Yanagidaru, vol. 132, 1833

The nurse early on

Shows the young lord

Her favourite erotic book.

– Manku awase, 1780

But were these examples simply a male fictionalisation of women’s interest in shunga? Monta Hayakawa’s ongoing conversations with elderly women across Japan suggest that during and after the subsequent Meiji period when erotic art and literature was strictly policed, women continued to purchase and view shunga.²⁰ibid. Considering now that women were likely part of the shunga audience during Edo period, it seems plausible that by commercial necessity, shunga demonstrating autonomous female desire would exist. Aside from the fantastical heterosexual gaze of male consumers, is it conceivable that examples of sex between women in shunga were produced in acknowledgement of desire between women?

Female love and sex in literature

Though heterosexual marriage was the expectation during the Edo period, same-sex relations were not explicitly prohibited by Shintoism or Buddhism, the dominant religions of the era, or by Tokugawa law. This was particularly the case for sex and romance between men, which assumed myriad different forms dictated by social factors including class, profession and age.²¹See Chalmers, note 8, ‘Sexual liaisons commonly occurred between priests and their young lovers (chigo/wakashu), samurai (nenja) and youths (chigo), and male kabuki actors or male prostitutes (kagema) and their patrons. Moreover, within this period male sexual relations were not exclusively homosexual but part of broader bisexual practices’, in Sharon Chalmers, ‘Tolerance, form and female disease: the pathologisation of lesbian sexuality in Japanese society’, Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, issue 6, August 2001. The concept of shūdō (male love; to ‘lay down one’s life’) was a central principle of Edo’s samurai culture, and sex and romance between men is a common subject celebrated in both shunga and historical Japanese literature.²²See eighteenth-century samurai manual Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure (Book of the Samurai). As Leupp explains:

‘The generous vocabulary of terms relating to male-male sex in early modern Japanese reflects a society at ease with the phenomenon. Anyone perusing the abundant primary and secondary sources will encounter numerous allusions to the “male eros” (nanshoku); “the way of youths” (wakashūdō, often abbreviated as jakudō or shudō); the “way of men” (nandō); “the beautiful way” (bidō); and the “secret way” (hidō). All these are euphemisms for male-male sex, conforming to certain specific conventions’.

Where ‘dan’ and ‘nanshoku’ mean ‘male love’; that is, between men, ‘joshoku’ (‘female love’) might be misinterpreted to mean the corresponding term for women. In reality, however, the term refers to the attraction of men to women. Within this male-centric rubric, no fixed term encompassing romantic love, or sex, between women existed in Japan until the 1910s when the term dōseiai (same-sex love) first appeared. As Peichen Wu asserts, it was not until the existence of this term that discourse around the subject could emerge in any formal sense, or that lesbianism (or bisexuality) could be formally recognised as a legitimate category of sexuality and sexual identity in Japan.²³Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2007, p. 80. The publication of newsletter Subarashi Onna (Wonderful Women) in 1975, and book Onna wo ai suru onnatachi no monogatari (Stories of women who love women) in 1987 are often referred to as the first first-person accounts of female relationships in Japan – a century and a half later than the NGV’s scroll and some two centuries later than early examples of female sex in shunga.

Though scarce, references to desire between women in pre-modern Japan do exist beyond shunga representations. While virtually no mention of female relationships has been identified in public, formal records, an examination of historical literature and private accounts supports much earlier examples, including those away from the fictional male gaze. Murasaki Shikibu (c. 973 or 978 – c. 1014 or 1031) was the author of what is widely considered to be Japan’s first novel, The Tale of Genji. A collection of poems and fictionalised accounts of romantic encounters within Japan’s Heian imperial court, the book is centred around the escapades of the fictional prince Genji. A woman of the Heian court during her own lifetime, Murasaki is celebrated for her refined skills in kana, a cursive calligraphic script developed by women and distinguishing Japanese emotions and literature from those written in Chinese scripts used by Japanese men of the era. So subtle are Murasaki’s romantic references, and so imbued with the cultural nuances of the period, many scholars still disagree about the exact meaning or atmosphere of certain scenes, and multiple conflicting English translations abound. There is little dispute surrounding a scene where the titular prince Genji beds the younger brother of his love interest, but in Murasaki’s own diaries, she reflects on her attraction to, and exchange of love poems with, other women in the court.²⁴Murasaki, in Wieringa, p. 33. According to Lisa Dalby, The Tale of Genji began as a game of sexual role play between Murasaki and a female friend.²⁵Dalby, in Wieringa, p. 33. Literary historian and one of Japan’s first lesbian feminists, Kimi Komashaku supports this interpretation.²⁶Komashakyu (1998), in Wieringa p. 33. Sasama Yoshihiko suggests that sexual relationships occurred between women both in the shogun’s ‘seraglio’, and in instances between ‘people who despised liaisons with men.’²⁷Sasama, in Leupp p. 189. A section reserved for ‘lesbian prostitution’ in Edo’s famed Yoshiwara pleasure district supported by multiple references in Tokugawa literature.²⁸See Aso Isoji & Fuji Akio (eds), Taiyaku Saikaku zenshu, vol. 16: Saikaku zoku tsurezure Saikaku nagori no tomo, Meiji shoin, Tokyo, 1977, p. 31, p. 36, note 16; Gendaigo yaku Saikaku zenshu, vol. 11: Saikaku okimiyage Saikaku zoku tsurezure Saikaku nagori no tomo, Teruoka Yasutaka (trans.), Shogakukan, Tokyo, 1977, p. 142, all cited in Leupp, p. 189. In the 1686 novel The life of an Amorous Woman by Ihara Saikaku, a young domestic servant recounts her first night working for her new mistress who after a night of sex together declares ‘when I am reborn in the next world, I will be a man. Then I shall be free to do what really gives me pleasure!’. Though the young protagonist has never before encountered this situation in previous jobs, she reflects pragmatically that ‘the Floating World is wide’.²⁹Ihara Saikaku, The Life of an Amorous Woman and Other Writings, Ivan Morris (trans.) New York, 1963, pp. 187–8.

Gender performance

Throughout the Edo period, the concept of pansexual gender fluidity and ambiguity was accepted and celebrated, though from a primarily male perspective. Male actors in kabuki theatre were frequently sexually idolised in onnagata – female roles. As Leupp states, ‘In both samurai and commoner society … a sexual interest in androgyny (futa-nari: literally “dual form”) persisted throughout the Tokugawa period’. A poem written before 1644, for example, celebrates the female-role actor Shimada Manosuke for this “futanari quality” ’:

Onna ka to mireba
otoko no Manosuke
futanari taira no
kore mo omokage

Looks like it might be a woman
[But it’s] Manosuke, the man
His face. too, is androgynous
Equally [male and female]³⁰Leupp, p. 174.

Often referred to as Edo’s ‘third gender’, visually gender-ambiguous boys and young men known as wakashū, were often styled in women’s kimono and make-up, and practised in the traditionally feminine arts, serving as pages to wealthy merchants or members of the samurai class. Though often self-fashioning, wakashū were frequently sexually objectified and exploited, and not ultimately self-selecting: many young men were socially obligated to perform the role on their journey to adulthood. In shunga, scenes involving both men and women with wakashū are well known. Representations of wakashū can be difficult to detect, often requiring the identification of subtle signifiers including a small section of shaven forelock (below), or a glimpse of male genitalia. Like kabuki and it’s onnagata, ambiguity was part of the appeal. Considering these conventions, is it possible that the smaller of the two individuals in Shunga scroll is a wakashū, and client to an older woman? Though there is no clearly defined shaven forelock, an ambiguously located hair accessory at the front of the head complicates the visual assessment.

End of an era

The NGV’s ambiguous Shunga scroll was produced during a significant window for sexual expression in Japan. Towards the end of the Edo period, a series of reforms saw increasing city government crackdowns on ‘commercial sex, “lewd” art and literature, and extravagance’, along with the closing of Edo’s teahouses and the movement of major Kabuki theatres to the city’s outskirts.³¹Leupp, p. 78. Amid this shift, American gunboats arrived in 1853 and, through ensuing ‘diplomacy’, Japan’s centuries of self-imposed isolation were ended, along with the Shogunate. Contact with the West was resumed through the Meiji restoration and imperial rule that followed. To avoid the fate of India and China at the hands of western infiltration, the Meiji government sought to rapidly ‘modernise’ and re-join the international stage. Along with an influx of trade and Western technology, prudish Victorian values and rigid Christian mores of chastity, heteronormativity and gender were introduced. As values rapidly shifted, the long traditions of nanshoku and homosexual desire which had been celebrated in popular culture, art, theatre and literature, became stigmatised as the country was subject to the imported attitudes of the west.³²Leupp, p. 204. Edo-period culture was scrutinised; shunga, now ‘obscene’ was effectively banned, and same-sex relations were criminalised in 1872.³³Tadashi Kobayashi, ‘The cultural historical significance and importance of Japanese shunga’, in T. Clark, C. A. Gerstle, A. Ishigami, & A. Yano, Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art, British Museum Press, London, 2013, p. 15. The introduction of the Meiji Civil Code in 1898 ultimately reinforced the ‘natural’ connections between sex and gender within state ideology; anyone outside of these categorisations was targeted for inappropriate or unnatural (‘fushizen’) behaviour.³⁴Sharon Chalmers, ‘Tolerance, form and female disease: the pathologisation of lesbian sexuality in Japanese society’, Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, issue 6, Aug. 2001.

Following the trail of newspaper reports on incidents relating to shunga during this time, Aki Ishigami demonstrates this dramatic shift in public perception surrounding shunga in any form – from a popular and widespread form of media to a ‘taboo’ subject perceived to be ‘obscene’, ‘embarrassing’, and ultimately ‘forbidden’.³⁵Aki Ishigami, ‘The reception of shunga in the modern era: from Meiji to the Pre-WWII years,’ Japan Review, Nichibunken, 2013, p. 37. By the First World War, no further mention of its presence could be traced. Though contraband shunga continued to circulate for private consumption, the production of new material depicting same-sex desire or non-binary expression of gender would have been treated with caution. The criminalisation of same-sex relations was eventually repealed, but the sexually conservative new values that had taken hold would continue for more than a century. The widow of author Yukio Mishima is said to have burned his collection of gay shunga after his death in 1970.³⁶Timon Screech, Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700–1820, Reaktion Books, London, 1999, p. 323.

Perhaps, like its maker who remains unidentified, the scene in the NGV’s Shunga scroll is deliberately ambiguous. The work does not fit neatly into shunga’s conventions of female sexual interaction – or representations of wakashū – and a discussion of contemporaneous sources raises more questions than answers about recognition of female desire and sexuality in Edo Japan. The extent to which shunga depicting sex between women represented an acknowledgement of desire between women remains uncertain, and is further complicated layered lenses of authorship, historical record, and conflicting contemporary readings. The floating world is indeed ‘wide’, as it is complex.

Please note: Throughout this essay, names prior to the end of the Edo period (1868) are noted by family name followed by given name. Names from the beginning of the Meiji period (1868 to present) are noted by given name followed by family name.

Annika Aitken is Curator, Art Museums, at the University of Melbourne, where she is also undertaking a PhD in Art History. From 2018 to 2021 she was Assistant Curator, Asian Art, at the National Gallery of Victoria

Notes