The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife

The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife is an erotic woodcut made circa 1820 by Hokusai, perhaps the first instance of tentacled creatures appearing in Japanese erotica (sometimes called tentacle sex).

It features a woman entwined sexually with a pair of octopuses. She is kissing a small octopus, while a larger one is performing cunnilingus on her.

This ukiyo-e woodcut arose in the Edo period in Japan when Shinto was making a resurgence and the resulting Animism and a more playful attitude to sexuality combined powerfully in Hokusai's piece. It is a celebrated example of shunga and has been reworked by a number of artists including:

• David Laity reworked the woodcut into a painting of the same name. He claims that the original piece was actually titled "Dancing With Katsushika Hokusai".
• Masami Teraoka brought the image up to date with his 2001 work "Sarah and Octopus/Seventh Heaven part of his "Waves and Plagues" collection.
• A parody image featuring the Flying Spaghetti Monster has been created by an unknown artist.
• British artist Lali Chetwnyd included a reenactment of the woodcut as part of her performance of "Erotics and Beastiality: Depraved Creativity" at the Liverpool Biennial of 2004. The scene saw bikini clad artist Eva Stenram disappear legs first into the costume of the slowly gyrating animal.
• The anime series Samurai Champloo made playful reference to this image in episode 5, "Artistic Anarchy". Mugen, looking through a ukiyo-e artist's collection, comments "Whoa, doin' it with a squid". The series is set in roughly 1675, well before the creation of this image, but anachronism is one of the hallmarks of Champloo.

Similar themes of human females having sexual intercourse with sea life have been displayed since the 17th century in Japanese netsuke, small carved sculptures only a few inches in height and often extremely elaborate. Once, people walked the streets of Edo with their moneypurses hanging from their belts, netsuke-pulls of human-marine erotica dangling from their drawstrings.