Hokusai's octopus print was long misread as violence; its own text says otherwise
In 1814 Hokusai published an erotic woodblock of a shell diver embraced by two octopuses. Western critics later called it a rape scene. Seen with the dialogue printed around it and the sea legend it echoes, the encounter is mutual, and the image went on to haunt Picasso, Rodin and Mad Men.
The design appears in Kinoe no Komatsu, or Young Pines, a three-volume shunga book that began appearing in 1814. None of its pictures carried titles. In Japanese it is usually called Tako to ama, the octopuses and the diver, and English-language specialists have rendered that differently: Richard Douglas Lane chose Girl Diver and Octopi, Matthi Forrer preferred Pearl Diver and Two Octopi. The open volume is small, roughly 16.5 by 22 centimetres.
Scholar Danielle Talerico argues that Edo-period buyers would have thought at once of Princess Tamatori, a humble diver who married Fujiwara no Fuhito and swam to the palace of the sea dragon Ryujin to recover a stolen pearl. Chased by the god's creatures, octopuses among them, she hid the jewel in a wound she cut in her own breast and died after surfacing. Hokusai's large octopus promises to carry the woman to that very palace, and Utagawa Kuniyoshi also painted the legend with octopuses in pursuit.
Talerico points out that Edmond de Goncourt and Jack Hillier treated the print as depicting assault, having viewed it cut off from its book and its words, although Goncourt did in fact describe the original setting in his monograph. Chris Uhlenbeck and Margarita Winkel use the case as a lesson in how isolation distorts meaning. The picture is also called an ancestor of modern tentacle erotica, yet psychologist Jerry S. Piven doubts that a playful Edo print explains violent postwar imagery, which he ties to Japanese social trauma after World War II.
Its afterlife in Western art is long. Picasso sketched a private version in 1903, and a 2009 Museu Picasso show called Secret Images hung it beside Hokusai's sheet; his 1932 Reclining Nude reworks the idea. In 2003 a painting by David Laity drew police to a Melbourne gallery, who found no breach of obscenity law. On screen, Roger Sterling hands the print to Peggy Olson near the end of Mad Men, and she hangs it in her office.
Source: The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife
