Meiji-period erotic literature is the body of sexual and sensual literary expression developed in Japan around the Meiji era (1868-1912). Carrying forward the Edo-period traditions of the erotic book and the illustrated reader, it took its own form at the crossing of three forces: the influence of Western literature, the establishment of a modern publishing system, and state regulation of expression.

Background: from Edo erotic books to Meiji

Before Meiji, Japan held a tradition of erotic books (shunpon), illustrated readers themed on sexual content. Parts of the sentimental novels of Shikitei Sanba and Tamenaga Shunsui, and the texts attached to shunga, circulated widely.

The “civilisation and enlightenment” policy after the Restoration pressed the transplant of Western notions of public order and morality. The 1880 criminal code included an offence of distributing obscene writings, legally organising the policing of sexual texts. The Edo erotic-book culture was thereby driven from public space and continued underground.

Translated literature and the influx of the “obscene”

In the age of civilisation and enlightenment, the spread of translated Western literature brought with it an influx of foreign works of sexual and sensual content. While Japanese versions of Zola’s naturalist novels and Flaubert were read, translations and adaptations of Western popular erotica circulated underground. Pseudo-medical terms imported from the West, “sexology,” “perverse desire,” “sexual psychology,” functioned as a loophole that disguised obscene expression as scholarship; publications titled “studies in perverse psychology” or “anatomy of sexual desire” effectively distributed sexual content while evading obscenity prosecution.

Naturalism and sexuality

The naturalist movement of the late Meiji period aimed at depicting the “true human being,” including sexual desire, the body, and ugliness. Tayama Katai’s The Quilt (1907), which laid bare the protagonist’s sexual desire for his female pupil, is spoken of as the high point of naturalist literature and at the same time drew criticism as obscene and immoral. Nagai Kafu, after returning from study in Europe, published works carrying sexual and erotic depiction in American Stories and French Stories, the latter banned from publication. Kafu later deepened his absorption in Edo erotic books and geisha culture and became one of the representative writers of Meiji and Taisho erotic literature.

The underground erotic-book trade

Despite legal policing, “secret books” and “erotic books” continued to be published and circulated underground in the Meiji period. They carried false places of publication and publishers or appeared anonymously, traded quietly in the back rooms of bookshops and at used-book sellers. Their content ranged from forms inheriting Edo erotic books to those taking in Western sexual depiction. From the late Meiji into the early Taisho period, mail-order advertisements for “erotic literature” and “erotic books” sometimes appeared in magazines.

The legacy of Meiji erotic literature

The problems formed in the Meiji period, the boundary line between the obscene and the literary, and the regulation and circulation of sexual expression, continued as fundamental themes of Japanese publishing and expressive culture through the Taisho, Showa, and present periods. The lineage of “literary eros” beginning with the works of Kafu and Tanizaki, and the lineage of the “popular eros” of the underground erotic book, are the two sources of Japanese sexual expressive culture that retain their influence to the present.

See also

• Shunga
• Sensual fiction
• Erotic novels
• Meiji-era sexuality