ALBUM: "Furyu juniki no eika" (Prosperous Flowers of the Fashionable Twelve Months)
PRINT: Father making love to his wife while she and her oldest son practice calligraphy (Month 7)
YEAR: ca.1772 Edo or Tokugawa period (1600-1868)
This months image is by Koryusai and is as shunga often depicts, a women responding to the advances of her man even when they are busy doing everyday chores. In this case the family are happily making sheets of calligraphy poems which will be cut out in readiness for the Tanabata Festival. The father still while holding the young child makes love to his wife, the child looks to be asleep and the man trying to be quiet, while his wife contorts her body and her expression clearly enjoying it but still focused on the job at hand.
The artist puts the wife into what looks like an impossible pose, the way her hips and legs appear to us as the artist displays the sexual organs to us the observer.
Tanabata Festival - This festival takes place on the seventh day, during which strips of different coloured paper with poems written on them are attached to bamboo branches. The Tanabata or Weaving Loom Festival originates from a fairytale relating how two stars, which appear opposite from each other in the Milky Way (Amanogawa or 'Heavenly River'), were only able to meet once a year. Kengyu or 'Cowherd' was the name of the first star and the other was named Shokujo or ' Weaver'. Weaver, the daughter of the King of Heaven, fell in love with the cowherd and after they were married, she moved to the cowherd's side of the Milky Way. Consumed by love, both the cowherd and the weaver neglected their duties, upsetting the king so much that he forced his daughter to return and take up her weaving work again. He allowed the couple to reunite once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh month. The word ' Tanabata' is also written in the bottom right margin".
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