At left is Yamazaki Joryû, Kabuki Actor Holding Irises, ca. 1725. This is a comparatively rare example of Tokugawa-period erotic art produced by a woman. It is not a print for mass production. Instead it is a hanging-scroll painting, almost certainly commissioned, though we cannot tell by whom because the painting bears no identifying marks other than those of the artist. Whoever commissioned the work was probably a man with a sexual interest in young lads, because it is clearly homoerotic. The iris flower being a common symbol for (homoerotically) sexualized boys and young men. Most likely, the man who commissioned the painting had sexual relations with the young man depicted in it.

Though less likely, it is possible that a woman commissioned the painting. In such a case, would it be an example of the object of female heterosexual desire or were there other circumstances? And if the painting was commissioned by a man, it is interesting that he employed a woman to depict an object of his homoerotic desire. Certainly this is a work whose circumstances of production we would benefit from knowing.

For more on woman artists of this time, see Patricia Fister, Japanese Woman Artists, 1600-1900 (Lawrence: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1988). Also see: http://music.acu.edu/www/iawm/pages/reference/japanartists.html.

At right is Inagaki Tsurujo, Woman Manipulating a Glove Puppet, from the late eighteenth century. As with the image above, it is a painting, and we do not know the identity of the person who commissioned it. We might guess that her gender was female, however, because this image clearly suggests female heterosexual erotic desire. Timon Screech comments about it as follows:

The construction of Tsurujo's picture is rather different [from others containing similar elements]. Firstly, she was a woman (the -jo in her name is the same as that in Ryûjo's). To 'manipulate' a puppet . . . is to exert a dominating control over it. Tsurujo turns the tables on the norms of gender control. But the painted woman is not actually manipulating the puppet: she merely holds it. The woman, not the puppet, is the mobile entity as she twists her head to the side while the puppet remains stationary. If she turned to face it, she would see right under the hat. Most of her forearm is inserted into the glove, which was necessary to keep the puppet upright, and she reaches to its middle. It is also possible to imagine the woman's fingers brushing what, in a real person, would be the genital area. She seems aware of this, for the look on her face is one of sexual gaming, even erotic satisfaction, a tickling of her fancy.

This picture seems more suited to the female gaze.

(Sex and the Floating World, pp. 166-167).

Incidentally, someone liked this painting enough to commission a second one just like it, for two nearly identical works by Tsurujo are extant.