The lamp is not put fully out; faint light catches in both pairs of eyes at close range as they embrace. Foreheads touch, breath mingles, and one reads the fine change of the other knitting a brow. From before insertion through the afterglow, the gaze never leaves the partner’s face. Edo erotic albums called this configuration of bringing face to face mensou-i (Japanese: 面相位, “facial-aspect position”). The most classical of face-to-face positions, centred on sight, it is one prototype of the modern concept of the missionary.

Mensou-i is the general term for positions in which a couple couples with faces turned toward each other. It appears in Edo sex manuals and erotic albums within the derivative classification of the forty-eight hands, used as a broad concept from the prone face-to-face form (the modern missionary), in which the man covers from above, to the side-lying facing form in which the couple embraces side by side. The source word mensou means countenance or facial features, not confined to sexual contexts.

Etymology

Mensou originally denotes the face or its features, a word current since the medieval period and frequent in Buddhist texts and Noh treatises, with general usages (“to read the face,” “the face crumbles”) continuing into the Edo period. Adding -i (the sex-manual term for position) yields the compound mensou-i. Synonymous phrasings (“the facing position,” “the face-to-face position”) coexisted in the albums, mensou-i settling as the most concise. Synonyms include “frontal position” and “facing position”; from the Meiji period, medical-translation texts favoured “facing position” as the rendering of the German Normalstellung and the English missionary position, and the term mensou-i receded from technical works into the domain of album scholarship and classical philology.

Structure and sub-forms

The substance of mensou-i lies in coupling at a distance that maintains the crossing of the gaze. Edo albums broadly distinguish three forms. First, the missionary form, in which the man lies prone over the woman, corresponding to the modern missionary: the man supports his weight on elbows or hands, the woman lies supine with knees raised or wrapped around the man’s hips, the gaze poured vertically from above to below. Second, the side-lying facing form, the facing version of the spoon position, with small hip motion, centred on closeness and conversation. Third, the seated facing form, in which the man sits cross-legged and the woman straddles his lap, near cowgirl but distinguished by the woman pressing her chest close rather than rising vertically. The album captions often group these as “broadly within the facing forms,” the coarseness of the division attesting to the generality of mensou-i as a superordinate category.

Reception

Mensou-i recurred as a classical position because the crossing of the gaze secures the ritual character of intercourse. Edo sex manuals carried a norm depicting intercourse not as mere reproduction or pleasure but as a scene of emotional exchange between spouses or lovers, where confirming the expression was equivalent to confirming the feeling, and mensou-i implements this norm most directly. Conversely, cultural spheres that avoided mensou-i also existed: the pleasure quarters tended toward rear-entry and cowgirl, the reason given as securing anonymity and non-emotional distance, since a courtesan and client coupling face to face risked generating a private relation beyond the commercial transaction, and so it was restrained. Private sex between spouses or lovers and commercial, recreational sex thus differed in their preference for mensou-i.

In modern adult works too, face-to-face positions are often chosen for expression depicting a character’s feeling; large-breast works emphasise closeness, and chijo works choose the seated facing form in which the woman looks down. The polysemy of the classical mensou-i corresponds to the genre divisions of the present.

Sub-forms

Prone mensou-i (man above, woman supine; closest to the modern missionary). Side-lying mensou-i (both partners side by side; weighted to conversation and closeness). Seated facing (coupling in a straddle; strong chest contact). Standing facing (coupling upright; classed as a sub-form).

Cultural note

Keisai Eisen’s Makura Bunko (1822-1832), a representative Edo sex manual, illustrates dozens of positions including mensou-i. From the Meiji period, medical-translation texts gradually replaced the word with “facing position” and “missionary position,” and in modern Japanese it is almost never used outside academic contexts, surviving as an archaism in album scholarship and the history of sexuality.

Related Terms

• Cowgirl (kijoui)
• Back position
• Chausu
• Insertion (sounyuu)
• Forty-eight hands