Pictures Of The Floating World

Recently, on a muggy Sunday morning, R and I went to the Seattle Asian Art Museum on Capitol Hill to see the featured exhibit Renegade Edo and Paris: Japanese Prints and Toulouse-Lautrec. This consisted of 90 Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings from SAM’s Japanese collection alongside private loans of works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The idea was to genially highlight the perceived parallel between the bawdy energy of Montmartre in the Belle Epoch and the “floating world” of Ukiyo-e. The “floating world” refers – in part - to the licensed brothel and theatre districts of Japan’s major cities during the Edo period (1603 to 1867). There was a pronounced flavor in both art worlds of an unfettered eroticism and contagious joyfulness which the art reflected with great skill and a genial lack of pretense. In neither instance was there anything remotely doctrinaire about these social dynamics, but there was an understanding that something was afoot, a strong appetite for living openly and freely, unhampered by the weight of an imposed moral code. It wasn’t immoral. It wasn’t decadent. It was a generosity of spirit steeped in an atmosphere of uninhibited glee, and a whiff of dissent.

Asai Ryōi, a Japanese samurai and writer of the early Edo Period, described Ukiyo in these terms: “living only for the moment, savouring the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms, and the maple leaves, singing songs, drinking wine, and diverting oneself in simply floating, unconcerned by the prospect of imminent poverty, buoyant and carefree, like a gourd carried along with the current of the river...this is what we call Ukiyo.”

It's rather odd reading these words during this age, fraught with so much social division and day-to-day uncertainty, WWIII an imminent possibility, an obscenely wealthy minority of elites living in gated communities, sailing catastrophically depleted oceans of heat-stressed plankton and bleached coral in luxurious yachts while millions live in poverty, homeless tents a ubiquitous sight in nearly all the cities of the western world, but especially conspicuous in the United States.

So, Ukiyo in the U.S. is a bit harder to attain than it was when I was a youth in the late 60s, living in the Bay Area and a frequent visitor to the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco.

That said, it’s not dead. I have a solid grip on the soft warm buoyancy of Ukiyo. There’s still a good quantity of it diffused among the neurons of an aging brain. I know lust when I see it. I still know what sensuality feels like. I can still occasionally sublimate it out of the soup of cortisol sloshing around in these old bones.

Brothels are another matter. I’ve never been to one. Never had the urge. Or the money. I get a sense from the ZZ Top song “La Grange” that a lot of fun can be had in a brothel. I imagine it’s not just a matter of getting off sexually. The numerous prostitutes found along Aurora Avenue here in Seattle puzzle me – hard to get a handle on the erotic dynamics there – but I can wrap my head around the ambiance of a brothel. There’s not a few of them in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, written a few years after Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was busy with his prints and posters. La Goulue kicking her heels at the Moulin Rouge. Jane Avril lifting a sexy silky sleek black leg at Jardin de Paris while a hand grips the fingerboard of a cello that looks ostentatiously like a massive hard-on.

Many of the Japanese woodblock prints were done by Kitagawa Utamaro, considered one of the greatest artists of the ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) movement; he is known especially for his portraits of female beauties, and whose sensuous artistry and vivid colors were a huge influence on the French impressionists. One of the prints – A High-Ranking Yujo With A Client – drew my attention. I found it enigmatic. This was an intimate scene of a man with a yujo, a female prostitute. What puzzled me was the lack of sexuality. If it was implicit in the various shapes and colors, the postures of the two people, the overall ambiance created by the intimacy of mood, it eluded me. There are several bare feet, belonging to the man I’m guessing, based on their positions. Other than that, the two people are heavily dressed in multiple layers of silk or cotton kimono. This is how people might dress in a freezing room during a brutal winter, but there’s no sign whatever that the room is cold. They seem completely comfortable, completely at ease with one another. Maybe they’ve had sex and are now just hanging out, enjoying one another’s company.

The man is lying on his stomach and the woman is sitting on his back. The man appears to be saying something and the woman is leaning forward a little, her head resting on her hand. I can’t tell if she’s bored, or listening with rapt attention, absorbed in the man’s talking. The man is holding a long slender implement – I’m guessing it’s a pen with a tiny nib – which is slanted upward, in the direction of the woman’s face. The nib is near the man’s mouth, which is tiny. Both mouths are tiny. The man’s looks like a tiny red butterfly and the woman’s is a tiny red dot. I like to imagine the man has just written a haiku in beautiful calligraphy on the floor and is describing his feelings and aesthetic goals, and that the woman finds this engrossing.

The man is a paying customer and the woman is rendering a service, but there’s absolutely no sense of that in the print. She’s definitely not in a hurry to get this guy on his way and prepare for another customer. They look more like a married couple.

The hairdos of these two people are astonishing. Thick black hair impeccably groomed. Slender sticks crisscross busily in the woman’s hair. Clothing and background wall are teeming with contrasting geometric patterns and strong, sweeping, graceful lines.

Perhaps what this is is an erotica of the intellect. The voluptuousness of thought in a moment of unhurried quiet and respect. Precisely the opposite of what you find in the outer world today, in which the simple act of walking exposes one to the perils of escooters and ebikes and outbreaks of road rage, especially in Seattle’s south of Lake Union district and the glass and steel towers housing the offices of Google and Amazon and Facebook. The energy here is invisible. Except when it isn’t. And people walk by riveted to the devices in their hands, void of expression. Incommunicable as tantalum, taciturn as nickel.