In the field of Japanese woodblock prints, monographs on single artists, as opposed to catalogues, by academically trained authors—rather than collectors or dealers—are still a relative novelty: Julie Nelson Davis’s is only the third, all appearing in the last decade. But hers has significantly raised the bar. Her study is meticulously researched and documented and has a clear and well-framed thesis and approach. She benefits, of course, from the superlative catalogue by Asano Shûgô and Timothy Clark for the 1995 Utamaro retrospective at the British Museum (Asano Shûgô and Timothy Clark, The Passionate Art of Kitagawa Utamaro, London: British Museum, 1995). She also follows in the steps of Timon Screech in her focus on the metaphors of vision (through mirrors, reading glasses, and physiognomy) that play an important role in many of the visual representations she examines (Timon Screech, The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan: The Lens Within the Heart, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Given that Utamaro is estimated to have produced over two thousand single-sheet prints, twenty to thirty erotic volumes, twenty-one illustrated poetry volumes, and over twenty other illustrated volumes, the focus of Davis’s Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty is extremely welcome.

After an introduction that situates ukiyo-e in the political and commercial context of the Edo period (1600–1868), and especially the eighteenth century when Utamaro was active, the book is comprised of five chapters. Chapter 1, “Constructing the Artist Known as Utamaro,” is an excellent presentation of the world of commercial publishing in Edo (modern-day Tokyo) in the eighteenth century, and especially the activities of Tsutaya Jûzaburô (1750–97), the highly successful publisher who in many senses “made” Utamaro, both as a patron and as a shrewd director of his output. The chapter surveys what is known of Utamaro’s biography (precious little) and reviews contemporaneous comments about him. It then recounts the career of Tsutaya, and especially his cornering the market on Yoshiwara saiken, or guidebooks to Edo’s licensed prostitution district (immediately outside of which sat Tsutaya’s bookshop). Utamaro emerged within and was promoted by a circle of cultural sophisticates (all men) who used the Yoshiwara as their social matrix and temporary escape from the severe class restrictions imposed by the Edo-period military government. One of the most important vehicles for these men was the composition of humorous poetry (kyôka), which was then published in deluxe albums by Tsutaya, illustrated by artists such as Utamaro (especially in the 1780s), whose own poems were also included on occasion. Among these kyôka albums by Utamaro are the well-known Insect Book and Shell Book of the late 1780s. The former includes a postscript by Utamaro’s teacher, Sekien, who praises his student’s ability to capture “the life expressed in the being of the insects . . . [and] the details of things” (56). Such attributed powers of observation, Davis argues, will become an important element of the Utamaro persona.

Chapters 2 through 4 concentrate on Utamaro’s physiognomic series of beautiful-women pictures (bijin-ga). Such series, according to Davis, played on Utamaro’s reputation as a careful observer and analyst of feminine beauty: “Aspects of the Utamaro persona so aptly engaged in the Insect Book and the Poem of the Pillow [a pornographic album] were turned now to what appeared to be the study of Edo women” (72). This move to series of single-sheet prints was encouraged by the Kansei Reforms of 1789–93 which banned, among other things, the kind of deluxe volumes Tsutaya had been producing for kyôka circles; in fact Tsutaya and the samurai author Santô Kyôden were punished by the authorities for three books they produced in 1791. Although Utamaro’s series made reference to physiognomic methods of character reading, Davis argues that his images are in fact derived from prototypes found in Kyôden’s humorous guides to the world of prostitution. Likewise Utamaro’s depictions of famous shop-girls are not portraits of individuals but “categories masquerading as portrait and as observation” (109).

Chapter 3 follows Utamaro’s gaze into the behind-the-scenes spaces of the brothel, reinforcing the artist’s image as a tsû or cognoscento of the “pleasure quarter” and its denizens. Davis argues that the “changes in the sex trade following the Kansei Reforms were probably behind a new rhetorical pose taken up in Utamaro prints from the middle of the 1790s” (118). A near doubling of the prostitution population drove down prices and threatened the quarters’ glamorous image. In response, Davis suggests, Utamaro’s prints worked “to reinvigorate the terms of exclusivity and renewed the posture of sophistication” (118) attributed to the Yoshiwara. He did this by producing a kind of “day in the life” series, Twelve Hours in the Yoshiwara (Seirô jûni toki tsukuki, ca. 1794–95), showing the entire day and night of a top-class courtesan. This series, too, gives the illusion of the artist catching behind-the-scenes moments that only an intimate would be privy to, reinforcing his own image as a connoisseur of women and “the ultimate insider in the world of Yoshiwara” (139). The construction of this persona reaches its apex in a diptych from around 1794–95, where a figure identified as Utamaro is shown in a sumptuous set of Yoshiwara rooms, in a parody of a climactic scene from the famous samurai revenge drama Chûshingura. The Utamaro figure has his name written on his jacket, and inscribed above him on a pillar is written: “By request Utamaro traces his own ravishing features” (148). But Davis insists that to accept this image as an accurate portrait of the artist “falls into the discursive trap of the picture and all that it proposes” (148). The true function of the picture remains to purvey the images of glamorous women to the desiring male gaze, supporting the interwoven markets of prostitution and publishing.

Davis’s text is undergirded by a virtual refrain about the commodification of women and their constructed glamorous images. But the selling glamour argument seems to miss the mark when we come to Utamaro’s series The Five Colours of Ink in the Northern Country (Hokkoku goshiki-zumi, ca. 1794–95), in which he depicts not only the high-class entertainers—the oiran and geiki—but also the “short-term prostitute” (kiri no musume); “the moatside prostitute” (kashi) picking her teeth; and the lowest “shot-gun” (teppô) prostitute (so called from the likelihood of her clients being “shot-down” by venereal disease), depicted lying back with her breasts bared, paper held in her mouth to clean up after the business is soon over. Such an image is not providing or representing “glamour.” In the British Museum catalogue, Clark suggested that “some of Utamaro’s designs do suggest a degree of empathy, if not sympathy, with the plight of his courtesan subjects” (43); the best Davis can argue is that the prints exist to show potential customers the kind of women they did not want—but this, then, hardly explains why anyone would buy prints depicting them. Clearly there was some kind of pleasure in the representation of abjection that contemporary scholars seem to have a difficult time acknowledging.

The somewhat doctrinaire and repetitive insistence on the fact of the commodification of women becomes most pronounced in the fourth chapter, which centers on the series The Parents’ Moralizing Spectacles (Kyôkun oya no megane, 1802–04) and a three-volume erotic work, Picture Book: The Laughing Tippler (Ehon warai jôgo, 1803). Using such didactic texts as the Onna Daigaku Takara-bako (Treasure Chest of the Women’s Great Learning, 1716; attributed to the moralist Kaibara Ekiken [1630–1714]), Davis paints a world of unremitting patriarchal Neo-Confucian oppression that denigrated women to the point of insisting that they were unfit to raise their own children. It is ironic that while Davis insists on the illusory nature of the world depicted by Utamaro, she takes the one depicted in didactic texts at face-value. Indeed, a closer examination of such texts themselves might have caused her to significantly modify her description: the illustrated Onna Daigaku Takara-bako includes pictures of women teaching texts to their children, and Yokota Fuyuhiko (whom Davis cites elsewhere) has calculated that the sections of the Onna Daigaku Takara-bako that deal with morality do not exceed forty-nine percent of the total, while a full twenty percent is dedicated to such literary texts as The Tale of Genji—a text that Ekiken elsewhere specifically forbade women to read.

Davis’s visual analysis also falters in this chapter. In discussing the paired images of bust-portrait (ôkubi-e, literally, “big head picture”) and “big vulva picture” (ôtsubi-e) in The Laughing Tippler, she translates the first female “type” as a “virgin,” with her two hands coyly clasped together in front of her genitals. Davis reads the Chinese characters for the type as shikaisha (267). Asano and Clark read the characters as “arabachi” (literally, “new pot,” i.e., not “broken in”) for no reason I can discern, but the characters literally mean “newly opened person,” and in fact it is clearly a man’s hand (larger, darker pigment) that the girl is grasping, which is why the picture is labeled “hands [clasped] in agreement” (shôchi no te, trans. Asano and Clark, 285). Needless to say, interpreting this first of three female types as a virgin rather than as someone newly initiated to sex has a significant effect on Davis’s interpretation of the work as a whole. In similar fashion, Davis’s ideology allows the second type, the wife, to be only a procreator, denying her any sexual agency, whereas her unshaved eyebrows indicate that she has not yet borne children and as such still retains sexual allure according to the typology of the period. The corresponding picture of the woman’s hand wrapping tissue around a penis at the mouth of her vulva must be the moment the penis is being withdrawn after orgasm and wiped off, not—as Davis would have it—guiding it in (when the tissue would make no sense); but for Davis it has to be entering, rather than withdrawing, so as to indicate “the ready state of the woman . . . and role appropriate to the reproductive member of the family unit” (204).

The final chapter concerns Utamaro’s imprisonment and punishment, along with others, for depicting, and clearly labeling, the hegemon Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598), an event from which many have believed he never really recovered. While Davis provides a good analysis of this important incident in the artist’s life, it lies rather to the side of the main focus of the book—Utamaro’s typological purveyance of images of desirable women.

The book is less well-edited than one would expect for a volume originally published by Reaktion Books, and a number of Japanese terms are consistently miswritten (wakashû rather than wakashu, okabashô for okabasho, as well as meishô for meisho, Jorurihime for Jôrurihime, and ningyo for ningyô). Despite her somewhat reductive representation of gender roles, however, Davis has produced an important work that will be required reading for anyone working on or interested in ukiyo-e, the publishing industry, and/or gender and the sex trade in late eighteenth-century Japan. Its strong thesis invites engagement with the author’s argument, the bibliography is extensive and up-to-date, and the illustrations ample enough to allow the reader the chance to study an important part of the Utamaro corpus.