GENJI’S ELEGANT PILLOW (GENJI KYASHA MAKURA) With Phaidon'scompendium Poem of the Pillow and Other Storiesguiding our journey, we take a spin around traditional pleasure quarters with these ten arousing artworks of Japanese erotic art. While styles have changed over the centuries, these works are connected by a shared celebration of life's fleeting, earthly pleasures under the term ukiyo-e, or the Floating World.
In stark contrast, Japanese erotica in paintings and prints have held a ubiquitous position in society, starting with the Heian aristocracy of the ninth century and trickling down to a rising, modern urban middle class. In the Western tradition, the idealized nude and-more explicitly-sex have long been sticking points in artistic discourse across generations-controversial for their beauty on the one hand, and its supposedly sinful nature on the other.
