A set comprising thirteen images, originally mounted as a folding album with printed preface and additional erotic stories (see also Shunga, cat. 119). One print shows two women with a dildo. This type of dildo, with a cord attached, was intended to be worn by women, not men. When two women were playing together it was worn around the hips: when one woman was enjoying it alone, she tied it to her ankle. Here the woman wearing the dildo holds a shell-shaped container holding some kind of cream. She says, ‘Seeing as we’re going to do it like this, I’ll put lots of the cream on it. So really make yourself come. Without the cream this big one would not go in.’ The aphrodisiac cream is obviously being used as a lubricant. The other woman puts a hand up to the dildo and urges her friend, ‘Hurry up and put it in. I want to come. I want to come five or six times without stopping.’ This is not strictly speaking a lesbian encounter. In the Edo period it was widely believed that dildos were used by ladies-in-waiting in the women’s quarters of samurai mansions. They were necessary because this was a world without men, rather than being an expression of affective love between women. But were dildos really in widespread use among ladies-in-waiting in the Edo period? Surely this is, rather, ‘the world of the lady-in-waiting as imagined by common townspeople’. [TY]