Haruhon-shi (Japanese: 春本史, “history of erotic books”) is the concept designating the comprehensive history of erotic book media in the Japanese language: with its source in the early-modern koshoku-bon (erotic books) and enpon (literally “amorous books”), it runs through modern gesaku (light fiction) and underground publishing, the prewar ero-guro-nonsense publishing, the postwar kasutori magazines, and the erotic fiction of the later Showa period. In the narrow sense it treats the line of text-centred enpon (prose books, as against the picture-centred shunga books), and in the broad sense it includes the history of erotic publications in general, including shunga. As the crossing-point of Japanese literary history, publishing history, and the history of sexual custom, it is an indispensable object of research for understanding Japanese culture from the early-modern period onward.

Overview

Haruhon (also read shunpon) is the general term for books whose theme is sexual love and sexual acts. In the early-modern period they were variously called koshoku-bon, enpon, higa-bon (secret-picture books), and the like, and there was no clear division of labour between the picture-centred shunga books (makura-e, “pillow pictures”) and the prose-centred koshoku tales and enpon. Etymologically, “haru” (spring) derives from a long-standing lexical association in which the word was used as a euphemism for sexual love in both China and Japan, placing it in the same line as “shunga” (spring pictures), “shunjo” (spring passion), and “shunshoku” (spring colour).

Haruhon-shi is generally divided into six broad periods: the establishment of koshoku-bon in the early early-modern period (17th century); the flourishing and suppression of enpon and sharebon in the late early-modern period (18th–19th centuries); the underground publishing and the formation of the concept of obscenity in the Meiji and Taisho periods; the ero-guro-nonsense publishing of the early Showa period; the popularisation of kasutori magazines and pornographic books after the war; and the establishment of erotic fiction from the 1960s onward citation needed.

Early early-modern period: the formation of koshoku-bon

From kana-zoshi to ukiyo-zoshi

At the stage of the kana-zoshi of the first half of the 17th century, sexual love appeared only to the degree of being material for moral lessons or comic tales. What turns this qualitatively is the appearance of Ihara Saikaku. Koshoku Ichidai Otoko (The Life of an Amorous Man), published by Ihara Saikaku in 1682, is a long novel depicting the wanderings of the protagonist Yonosuke along the “way of love” from age seven to sixty, and is regarded as the starting point of the literary genre later called ukiyo-zoshi. While placing sexual love at the centre of its theme, the work is characterised by being composed not of vulgar bodily description but of realistic depiction of pleasure-quarter culture and townsman custom, in a style rich in wit.

Saikaku subsequently published koshoku works in quick succession, such as Koshoku Gonin Onna (Five Amorous Women, 1686), Koshoku Ichidai Onna (The Life of an Amorous Woman, 1686), and Nanshoku Okagami (The Great Mirror of Male Love, 1687). These treated both female love and male love, and established thematic types such as the chaste-woman tale, the courtesan tale, and the wakashu (young-man) tale. Saikaku’s koshoku-bon are valued as a literary achievement distinguished from later erotic books in general, in that they have a strong character as ethnographic records of townsman society rather than being mere obscene works.

Hachimonjiya-bon and mass production

After Saikaku’s death, the Kyoto bookseller Hachimonjiya Jisho engaged Ejima Kiseki and others to mass-produce koshoku works. These, collectively called “Hachimonjiya-bon,” diluted Saikaku’s literary quality while fixing koshoku works as a central genre of commercial publishing. In the same period, picture-centred shunga books (makura-e books) also developed, and illustrated enpon by Hishikawa Moronobu, Nishikawa Sukenobu, and others circulated widely.

Late early-modern period: the flourishing of sharebon and enpon, and the Kansei and Tempo suppressions

Sharebon and ninjobon

In the latter half of the 18th century, the “sharebon” became fashionable, centred on Edo. The sharebon of Santo Kyoden and others were set in the pleasure quarters (such as Yoshiwara) and depicted the exchanges between client and courtesan in conversational form; they are a distinctive gesaku genre whose axis is the aesthetic of “tsu” (connoisseurship) rather than direct sexual description. In 1791, Matsudaira Sadanobu, who led the Kansei Reforms, suppressed the sharebon as disturbing public morals; Kyoden was sentenced to fifty days in hand-cuffs, and the publisher Tsutaya Juzaburo had half his assets confiscated.

Entering the 19th century, the “ninjobon” of Tamenaga Shunsui and others became fashionable, mainly targeting a female readership. The ninjobon took the affection between men and women as its theme, and not a few contained sexual description. In 1842, Mizuno Tadakuni, who led the Tempo Reforms, suppressed the ninjobon as corrupting public morals; Shunsui was sentenced to hand-cuffs and died of illness in despondency.

The clandestine publication of enpon

Enpon containing full-scale sexual description, which official booksellers could not list themselves as publishers of, circulated underground as “hibon” (secret books) concealing the names of publisher and author. First-rank artists such as Kitao Shigemasa, Kitagawa Utamaro, Katsushika Hokusai, and Utagawa Kunisada took up the brush for these, and a body of works survives that famous gesaku writers such as Shikitei Sanba and Jippensha Ikku are presumed to have been involved in anonymously in the text books as well. These did not travel on the regular distribution network but were distributed through lending libraries and itinerant peddlers citation needed.

Meiji and Taisho periods: the end of gesaku and underground publishing

Meiji gesaku and the strengthening of control

After the Meiji Restoration, the tradition of gesaku was inherited by Kanagaki Robun, Somezaki Nobufusa, and others, but with the development of the Newspaper Ordinance (1875), the old Penal Code (1880), the Publishing Act (1893), and Article 175 of the current Penal Code (1907, the offence of distributing obscene materials), legal regulation of sexual expression was systematised. With this, the circulation of early-modern-style enpon became difficult, and books on the theme of sexual love shifted to surviving in the form of underground publications, private editions, and manuscripts.

Naturalist literature and the obscenity controversy

In the mainstream of literary history, naturalist literature from Tayama Katai’s Futon (The Quilt, 1907) onward attempted to treat sexual matters as a literary theme. The works of Nagai Kafu’s Furansu Monogatari (Tales of France, 1909, banned), Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, and Tokuda Shusei formed the core of the controversy over the boundary between sexual description and artistry. In the same period, the enpon research and history of sexual custom by Maruki Sado, Komine Daiu, and others accumulated within the bounds of underground publishing.

Early Showa period: the age of ero-guro-nonsense

In the urban culture from the late 1920s to the early 1930s, a tendency collectively called “ero-guro-nonsense” swept the publishing world. Magazines such as Hentai Shiryo, Hanzai Kagaku, and Grotesque by Umehara Hokumei and others, the enpon research of Sakai Kiyoshi, and the limited editions of Sakurai Shoten and the Literary Materials Research Society developed publishing on the themes of sexual custom, the bizarre, and perversion, aimed at a relatively high printing quality and an intellectual readership.

These formed one cross-section of the modernist urban culture of prewar Japan and have become important objects of later postwar-sexual-culture and Taisho-romance research. From the late 1930s onward, with the advance of militarism and the strengthening of the Peace Preservation Law and the publishing police, ero-guro-nonsense publishing was wiped out.

Postwar period: from kasutori magazines to erotic fiction

The kasutori-magazine period (1946–1955)

Against the background of the liberalisation of publishing under the 1945 defeat and the GHQ occupation, from around 1946 a mass of low-quality, cheaply printed popular magazines collectively called kasutori magazines appeared in large numbers. Ryoki, Riberaru, Kitan Club, and Fufu Seikatsu are known as representative magazines; while inheriting the prewar tradition of ero-guro-nonsense, they added themes peculiar to the social situation under occupation (streetwalkers, the black market, demobilised soldiers) to form a distinctive publishing culture.

These magazines took a composition mixing short stories, reading matter, true accounts, and gravure photographs; they are a composite medium rather than text-centred erotic books, but they are placed in the line of haruhon-shi as the starting point of postwar sexual-expression publishing.

Third-rate gekiga magazines and the establishment of erotic fiction

Entering the 1960s, against the background of the paper supply and the stabilisation of the readership, the genre of text-centred sexual-love fiction was established as “erotic fiction.” Tomishima Takeo, Kawakami Soukun, Uno Koichiro, and Dan Oniroku were active as representative authors, and specialist labels in shinsho and bunko formats (Futabasha, Tokuma Shoten, and so on) were put in place. Erotic fiction is understood as a genre that reorganised the tradition of textual sexual-love narration, going back to the koshoku works and enpon of the early-modern period, within the style of postwar mass publishing.

Diversification arose within the genre as well, with the SM-type erotic fiction from Dan Oniroku’s Hana to Hebi (Flower and Snake, 1962) onward, Uno Koichiro’s “I-novel”-style erotic fiction, and Tomishima Takeo’s youth erotic fiction. These passed through the serialisation media of middlebrow-fiction magazines such as Shosetsu Gendai, Mondai Shosetsu, and Shosetsu Hoseki, forming a distribution route in which they were later issued in bunko format.

Third-rate erotic gekiga magazines, the lolicon boom, and the retreat of text media

From the late 1970s onward, visual media such as erotic gekiga magazines, erotic manga, bini-bon, and adult videos came to occupy the mainstream of sexual-expression publishing. Text-centred erotic books (erotic fiction), while still maintaining a fixed readership, came to lower their weight within the publishing world as a whole.

Significance in cultural history

Haruhon-shi is a field that makes it possible to trace the historical development of discourse on sexual love in Japan from the early-modern period onward, together with the transformation of the forms of publishing media. The tradition of textual sexual-love narration that begins with Ihara Saikaku connects continuously, through the Kansei and Tempo suppressions, the exclusion from the public sphere by Meiji’s Article 175, the modernist revival of the early Showa period, and the postwar popularisation, to today’s erotic fiction and adult literature.

In recent publishing-history research, systematic study from the standpoint of gender history and media history has advanced, such as Osada Atsushi’s Enpon Kenkyu (1962) and Koshoku-bon no Sekai (1996), Eikyubo Yoko’s research on the history of sexual expression for women, and Yasuda Rio’s A Complete History of Japanese Erotic Magazines (2019). Collections of enpon, kasutori magazines, and erotic fiction are systematically preserved at institutions such as the Waseda University Institute of Contemporary Political and Economic Studies, the National Diet Library, and the Meiji University Yoshihiro Yonezawa Memorial Library of Manga and Subcultures, and research access is being advanced.

On the other hand, this is also a field that demands documentary and ethical reservation, given the circumstances under which many early-modern enpon were published anonymously, the biases peculiar to the writings of prewar enpon researchers (Umehara Hokumei, Saito Shozo, and others), and the lack of consideration for the human rights of those involved in postwar kasutori magazines.

See also

• Shunga
• Erotic fiction
• Erotic manga
• Dan Oniroku
• Article 175 of the Penal Code