In 1815, 15 years before he made his most famous print,
The Great Wave,
Hokusai published three volumes of erotic art. In one of them there is a
woodcut print known in English as ‘The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife’
and in Japanese as ‘
Tako to ama’, ‘Octopus and Shell Diver’. It
depicts a naked woman lying on her back, legs spread and eyes closed,
while a huge red octopus performs cunnilingus on her. The octopus’s slit
eyes bulge between the woman’s legs and its suckered limbs wrap around
her writhing body. A second, smaller octopus inserts its beak into the
woman’s mouth while curling the thin tip of an arm around her left
nipple. In Europe, the print was interpreted as a scene of rape, but the
critics didn’t read Japanese. In the text arranged in the space around
the three entwined bodies, the shell diver exclaims: ‘You hateful
octopus! Your sucking at the mouth of my womb makes me gasp for breath!
Ah! Yes … it’s … there! With the sucker, the sucker! … There, there! …
Until now it was I that men called an octopus! An octopus! … How are you
able? … Oh! Boundaries and borders gone! I’ve vanished!’..
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