A woodcutter descending the mountain with firewood on his back. Edo print designers laid the remnant of that gesture over a standing position in the bedchamber. Somabito (Japanese: 杣人, “woodcutter”) is a standing variant of the Forty-Eight Hands in which the inserting partner lifts the receiving partner onto the back or hips as if carrying firewood, and the receiving partner clings from behind. Likened to a mountain woodcutter (somabito) carrying timber down the slope, it is a model case of Edo erotica borrowing occupational imagery for literary naming. Belonging to the standing-application lineage, it may occupy a prehistoric place relative to the ekiben carry.

Overview

In somabito the inserting partner stands and lifts the receiving partner onto the back or hips, the receiving partner clinging from the back side, both legs wrapped around the inserting partner’s hips, the inserting partner supporting the thighs and buttocks with both hands. Unlike the face-to-face standing form and the ekiben carry, both body axes face the same direction, a rear-entry standing form.

Standing positions are often placed in non-standard scenes (outdoors, hallway, veranda), and somabito belongs to that lineage. A familiar occupational image to the Edo commoner, the woodcutter carrying timber down the mountain road, is transposed as the name of a standing coupling. Edo erotica’s borrowing of occupational imagery has several examples (palanquin-bearer, courier, woodcutter, fisherman, sumo wrestler), showing how widely early-modern labour scenes were used as naming material.

In motion, somabito is a demanding posture requiring the inserting partner’s strength, with a high structural load of performing the coupled motion while fully supporting the receiving partner’s weight. Long maintenance is difficult, and in real life it is presumed to be a short application form. In the album figures it is often placed in extraordinary scenes, outdoors, in the mountains, by a river, developing as a picture-theme of improvised or chance coupling.

Etymology

Somabito (also somaudo) originally names the occupation of felling and hauling timber in the mountains. Soma means forest, timber, or felling-ground, an old word recorded from the Nara-Heian periods, forming compounds like somayama (felling-ground) and somagi (felled timber). Somabito means one who works the felling-ground, near-synonymous with woodcutter (kikori).

In early-modern Japan, the labour of the woodcutter was a core occupation of forest management and construction-timber supply, the timber hauled to cities like Edo and Osaka by river. The woodcutter’s labour included the whole heavy task of felling, processing into firewood and boards, carrying it down on the back, and floating it on rivers. The figure carrying a heavy load down a steep mountain path was a symbolic scene of early-modern labour, frequently taken up in painting, haikai, and senryū; woodcutter labour appears in Hokusai’s Hokusai Manga and Hiroshige’s landscape prints. The Forty-Eight-Hands name likens the woodcutter’s gesture to the standing position of carrying the receiving partner on the back, the shared gesture of “carrying” being the core of the analogy. English has no equivalent; modern translations render it woodcutter position.

History

The name appears intermittently in Edo erotic books as a standing-application form. Standing positions are limited in number in the albums, where coupling on the bedding dominates; standing is placed in non-standard scenes (outdoors, hallway, veranda), and somabito’s name functions as a picture-theme of “coupling in a special place” or “chance coupling,” visualising improvised intercourse at the site of occupational labour, in the mountains, by the river, in the fields.

Somabito is kinematically closely related to the modern ekiben carry. Ekiben, the standing-application form in which the inserting partner lifts the receiving partner, circulated widely under the name “ekiben” from the late twentieth century. Where ekiben centres on a face-to-face lift, somabito centres on a rear-facing carry, kinematically distinct but sharing the structure of “supporting the receiving partner aloft while standing.” Some hold somabito to be a prehistory of ekiben: although the Edo somabito theme does not directly connect to the modern circulation of ekiben, the “carry-and-shoulder” kinematics of standing-application positions form one continuous lineage of sexual expression from early-modern to modern times. Compositions of standing rear coupling are scattered through the albums of Utagawa Kunisada and Toyokuni, not always inscribed “somabito” but readable as the same kinematic type.

From the Meiji period, under publication control and the change in occupational structure (mechanisation of forest labour, the disappearance of the woodcutter occupation), the name was marginalised to the old-book market and a circle of shunga scholars. Because the occupation itself has nearly vanished in modern Japan, understanding the naming’s original intent requires knowledge of early-modern labour history, the obverse of the Forty-Eight-Hands proper names having formed as a vocabulary continuous with early-modern life and culture.

Form and movement

The inserting partner stands and carries the receiving partner on the back; the receiving partner clings frontally to the inserting partner’s back, arms around the neck and shoulders, legs wrapped behind the hips; the inserting partner supports the thighs and buttocks with both hands and receives the weight on the back and hips. Both axes face the same direction, the receiving partner behind the inserting partner, the coupling rear-facing with the male organ inserted at a backward-flexed angle, a distinctive kinematic character.

The motion combines the inserting partner’s up-down and forward-back hip movement, the receiving partner’s body swaying with it, the receiving partner’s own active hip motion limited. Heavily dependent on the inserting partner’s strength, stable coupling is possible only with a small receiving partner or a notably strong inserting partner. The albums do not depict these constraints, composing instead as if the two maintain the posture easily.

Compared with ekiben (face-to-face carry), somabito (rear-facing carry) sits as one of the two main types of “lifting the receiving partner while standing”: the face-to-face ekiben crosses gaze and breath with high closeness, while the rear-facing somabito has no crossing gaze and a stronger impression of labour-like, kinematic gesture. In the early-modern albums both are placed as standing-application forms, but from the modern period the face-to-face ekiben became the mainstream standing-application position and the rear-facing somabito was marginalised, plausibly because the face-to-face type more explicitly expressed emotional contact, consistent with the modern concept of intimacy.

Reception and meaning

The name somabito is a model case of the Edo literary naming sensibility that takes the gesture of early-modern mountain labour into a sexual position. A familiar labour scene, the woodcutter carrying a heavy load down the mountain road, becomes the name of a position. This back-and-forth contrasts with the modern sensibility that isolates sex from labour into a special domain, instead placing sex within the continuity of occupational labour, characteristic of early-modern Japan. The continuity of early-modern labour culture and sexual expression that the name reflects is a viewpoint for reassessment in modern sexology: the early-modern sensibility that places sex within the continuity of labour, life, and faith presents another way of representing sexuality, distinct from the modern view that treats sex as an isolated special domain.

Related terms

• Forty-Eight Hands
• Ekiben
• Supine ekiben (ne-ekiben)
• Standing position (ritsui)
• Rear-entry (back position)
• Shunga