Designed for pleasure

This book examines the floating world of popular culture centered in Edo [modern Tokyo] during the period between 1680 and 1860, when Japan transformed itself from an agrarian to a booming commercial economy. By 1710, Edo was the largest city in the world, with a population of over a million. We know so much about this time in part because of the vast body of imagery created and treasured by succeeding generations. The artists and writers held a looking glass up to their heady world and, in the process, to themselves. Fads and fashions proliferated, and this highly literate, consumer-driven society insisted on being up to date. Innovative color printing techniques fed the demand for ever-new information. Designed for Pleasure brings together paintings, prints, and illustrated books featuring images known as ukiyo-e, or pictures of the floating world. The carefully selected images present the principals of that realm—the actor, the artist, the courtesan, the poet, the publisher, the patron—and they also reveal the confluences and contradictions in a time of enormous social, cultural, and economic change in Japan.