During her escape, the Dragon King and his sea-life minions (including octopuses) pursue her. In the story, Tamatori steals a jewel from the Dragon King. They would have recognized the print as depicting the legend of the female abalone diver Tamatori. It is an example of shunga (Japanese erotic woodblock art) and has been reworked by a number of artists, such as Masami Teraoka, who brought the image up to date with his 2001 work 'Sarah and Octopus/Seventh Heaven', part of his Waves and Plagues collection.Ī scholarly paper by Danielle Talerico showed that although western audiences often interpret Hokusai's famous design as rape, Japanese audiences of the Edo period would have viewed it as consensual. Īmong the most famous of the early instances is an illustration from the 1814 Hokusai book Kinoe no Komatsu, known as The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife. Some of the earliest examples were woodblock prints depicting women being violated by octopi, such as Kitao Shigemasa's Programme of Erotic Noh Plays (1781) and Shunshō Katsukawa's Lust of Many Women on One Thousand Nights (1786). Creatures with tentacles have appeared in Japanese erotica long before animated pornography.
