Book Description
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.
