What’s gone wrong with erotica? Are we too addled by a hypersexualised age to find artistic beauty in images of desire?

The question is aroused – or not – by a book of “modern shunga” that takes the sensual art form invented in 17th-century Japan and subjects it to some crass, and actually quite prudish, jokes. It’s all very well showing footballs, feathers and emoji-like Punch and Judy faces over the rude bits in these sketchy pastiches of shunga masterpieces. But what happened to good old-fashioned voyeurism? Why cover up what people in the past loved to look at?

Asian art has, throughout history, been more lustful than European. The Christian era censored sex out of European art (only in the 16th century did things get fun again, especially in sun-warmed Italy). Meanwhile, Indian art was full of erotic scenes – from curvy gods to courtly trysts – and Chinese painters delighted in tales of ghostly courtesans. But one of the most civilised styles of pornographic picture evolved in early modern Japan.

Shunga prints show men and women enjoying mutually gratifying sex with a unique mix of graphic detail and artistic sophistication. One of the greatest of all shunga shows a woman who has dived into the sea to be pleasured by two octopuses.

The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife was made by Hokusai, one of Japan’s greatest artists, in 1814. The most gifted masters were delighted to design shunga. Yet this woodblock print (and modern perceptions of it) perhaps help to explain why people want to cover up the fun bits in shunga art with silly jokes. Wikipedia describes it as “a zoophilia-associated woodcut design”; this seems a somewhat over-specialist description. The fisherman’s wife does not, I think, have a sexual attraction to animals. She just wants some tentacular stimulation. The fisherman presumably does not provide it, so she dreams of a gastropod lover.

What’s been lost in modern minds – and this is why we can’t cope with the freedom of shunga – is the metaphoric freedom, the open book of sensual associations, that can allow dreams of being pleasured by an octopus.



The French historian Michel Foucault mapped out this great change in his History of Sexuality. Before the modern age there was no such thing as “sexuality”, no science of sex, no clinical definitions of perversions or norms. So anything could happen, and in shunga it truly does.

Today we define sex, analyse it – and tame it. Hokusai’s sensual dream picture becomes a specimen of “zoophilia” to be pickled in a university jar. And we scratch out the dirty bits in Japan’s classic erotica, lest they lead the imagination into deep waters of uncharted desire.