From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife is an erotic woodcut of the ukiyo-e genre made around 1820 by the Japanese artist Hokusai. Perhaps the first instance of tentacle eroticism, it depicts a woman entwined sexually with a pair of octopuses, the smaller of which kisses her while the larger one performs cunnilingus. A shot of the work printed on a postcard that is being looked at by Anaïs Nin (Maria de Medeiros) at the beginning of the 1990 film Henry & June earned that movie the very first NC-17 film rating. It is no coincidence that the wife in question is a fisherman's wife, the significance of the absence of men in fishermen's villages is also testified by the fact the first dildos were found in fishermen's villages.

Interpretations

Scholar Danielle Talerico notes that the image would have recalled to the minds of contemporary viewers the story of Princess Tamatori, highly popular in the Edo period. In this story, Tamatori is a modest shell diver who marries Fujiwara no Fuhito of the Fujiwara clan, who is searching for a pearl stolen from his family by Ryūjin, the dragon god of the sea. Vowing to help, Tamatori dives down to Ryūjin's undersea palace of Ryūgū-jō, and is pursued by the god and his army of sea creatures, including octopuses. She cuts open her own breast and places the jewel inside; this allows her to swim faster and escape, but she dies from her wound soon after reaching the surface.

The Tamatori story was a popular subject in ukiyo-e art. The artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi produced a number of works based on it, which often include octopuses among the creatures being evaded by the bare-breasted diver. In the text above Hokusai's image, the big octopus says he will bring the girl to Ryūjin's undersea palace, strengthening the connection to the Tamatori legend. The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife is not the only work of Edo-period art to depict erotic relations between a woman and an octopus. A number of early netsuke carvings show cephalopods fondling nude women. Hokusai's contemporary Yanagawa Shigenobu created an image of a woman receiving cunnilingus from an octopus very similar to Hokusai's in his collection Suetsumuhana of 1830.

Talerico notes that earlier Western critics such as Edmond de Goncourt and Jack Hillier interpreted the work as a rape scene. However, she notes that these scholars would have seen it apart from the Kinoe no Komatsu collection and without understanding the text and visual references, depriving it of its original context. According to Chris Uhlenbeck and Margarita Winkel, "[t]his print is testimony to how our interpretation of an image can be distorted when seen in isolation and without understanding the text."

Influence

The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife is often cited as an early forerunner of tentacle erotica, a motif that has been common in modern Japanese animation and manga since the late 20th century. Modern tentacle erotica similarly depicts sex between human women and tentacled beasts; notably, however, the sex in modern depictions is typically forced, as opposed to Hokusai's mutually pleasurable interaction. Psychologist and critic Jerry S. Piven, however, is skeptical that Hokusai's playful image could account for the violent depictions in modern media, arguing that these are instead a product of the turmoil experienced throughout Japanese culture following World War II, which was in turn reflective of pre-existing, underlying currents of cultural trauma. However, scholar Holger Briel argues that "only in a society that already has a predilection for monsters and is used to interacting with octopods such images might arise," citing Hokusai's print an early exemplar of such a tradition.

The work has influenced a number of later artists such as Félicien Rops, Auguste Rodin, Louis Aucoc, Fernand Khnopff, and Pablo Picasso. Picasso painted his own version in 1903 that has been shown next to Hokusai's original in exhibits on the influence of 19th-century Japanese art on Picasso's work. In 2003 a derivative work by Australian painter David Laity, also titled The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, sparked a minor obscenity controversy when it was shown at a gallery in Melbourne; after receiving multiple complaints Melbourne police investigated, but determined it did not break the city's pornography laws. Hokusai's print has had a wide influence on the modern Japanese-American artist Masami Teraoka, who has created a number of images of women, including a recurring "pearl diver" character, being pleasured by cephalopods as a symbol of female sexual power.

The so-called "aria della piovra" ("Octopus aria") "Un dì, ero piccina" in Pietro Mascagni's opera Iris (1898), on a libretto by Luigi Illica, may have been inspired by this print. The main character Iris describes a screen she had seen in a Buddhist temple when she was a child, depicting an octopus coiling its arms around a smiling young woman and killing her. She recalls a Buddhist priest explaining: "That octopus is Pleasure... That octopus is Death!"

History

Hokusai created The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife during the Edo period in when Shinto was making a resurgence; this influenced the piece's animism and playful attitude towards sexuality. It is a celebrated example of shunga and has been reworked by a number of artists. Similar themes of human females having sexual intercourse with sea life have been displayed since the 17th century in Japanese netsuke, small carved sculptures only a few inches in height and often extremely elaborate.

Variations on title

In Richard Lane's Images of the Floating World (1978) this print is referenced as Girl Diver and Octopi from the series Young Pine Shoots (1814). Matthi Forrer in Hokusai: Prints and Drawings (1992) titles it Pearl Diver and Two Octopi from Young Pines (Kinoe no komatsu) with the same 1814 date.

See also



