Not only did he create extraordinary prints and paintings of female beauties, often high-class prostitutes, but he was also, it was said, a great habitué of the brothels in Edo himself. Prostitutes, even at the top end of the market, no longer have any of the glamor associated with their trade in eighteenth-century Japan, but “Utamaro” is the name of a large number of massage parlors that still dot the areas where famous pleasure districts once used to be. Even in Utamaro’s time, the glamor of prostitutes was largely a fantasy promoted in guidebooks and prints. He made a living providing pictures of the “floating world” of commercial sex, commissioned by publishers who were paid by the brothel owners. [...]
In all three pictures, there is an almost total absence of men. These are women on display for the eyes of men, no doubt, advertisements for the sexual trade that played such an important part in the merchant culture of the Edo Period (1603-1868). Politically oppressive, the authorities nonetheless gave license to men to indulge themselves in amusements of varying degrees of sophistication acted out in a narrow and interconnected world of brothels and Kabuki theaters. Sex, kept in bounds by rules of social etiquette, was less threatening to the authorities than political activity. (Utamaro was arrested once, not for his pornographic prints, but for depicting samurai grandees, which was forbidden.) And the roles played by the women in this world, especially the high-class ones, were hardly less stylized and artificial than those performed at the Kabuki. [...]
The exotic image of traditional Japan as a kind of paradise of sexual refinement, which was already the product of a fantasy world promoted by artists like Utamaro, appealed to sophisticated collectors, writers, and artists in late-nineteenth-century Paris. The pleasure world of the Edo Period was seen as an elegant and sensuous antidote to the ugliness of the industrial age. And the same was true in Japan.
