Credit: Tako to Ama by Katsuhiko Hokusai (1814)

Dreadful Desires

Ama and the Octopus: Introduction

Love is a Many-Tentacled Thing…

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The first thing to know about Hokusai’s famous 1814 print The Dream of Fisherman’s Wife is that it isn’t a dream, there is no fisherman, and there’s no wife. No one’s quite sure these days how that English title came about, but we can probably thank the Victorian era’s straitlaced sensibilities for it. On the other hand, there’s a lot of Japanese folklore to dive into to make sense of the cephalopod throuple this piece portrays, and perhaps some poor British art professor got tired of explaining it all and started saying “she’s a fisherman’s wife or something, leave me alone.”

Fools rush in where stuffy old scholars fear to tread, so here we go!

It all started with the legend of Princess Tamatori, a beautiful ama diver. Ama were the traditional pearl divers of ancient Japan, though in truth pearls were rare windfalls and they more often collected abalone shells. There were very particular breathing, diving, and swimming techniques associated with the ama, along with a spiritual perspective and aesthetic that lent them a certain cultural mystique, and the tradition of diving nude made them rather sensual figures in the popular imagination. They were, in folklore and classical ukiyo-e art, akin to human mermaids.

There are a few ama divers still working today, more to keep the tradition alive than out of practical necessity. They wear modern wetsuits, though, so their more prurient fans will have to stick to woodblock prints.

Credit: Tamatori Attacked by the Octopus by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1845)

Princess Tamatori was an ama diver, and, for the sake of her husband and their young son, she vowed to recover a magical pearl that’d been claimed a generation before by the Dragon King Ryūjin, god of the ocean. Using all her skill as an ama, she reached the Dragon King’s palace at the bottom of the ocean and stole back the pearl. Ryūjin and his entourage of aquatic creatures gave chase, and, in a desperate bid to escape, she cut open her breast with her diving knife, stuck the pearl inside, and so freed her arms to outrace the monsters. She made it to shore and, with her dying breath, gave the pearl to her family and thus secured their future.

This was the original story of Tamatori-hime, and the image of a lone ama being pursued by all the horrors of the ocean deep, with giant octopuses prominent among them, became a very popular art motif. And, since Rule 34 was a thing even in (maybe especially in) feudal Japan, the chase soon evolved into a sexual pursuit with the octopus as a suitor. That’s the context of Hokusai’s Tako to Ama (Octopus and Shell Diver), and it’s one that’d already been around for centuries. The image below is almost fifty years older and it portrays much the same thing, though with the naughty bits strategically covered and the octopus’s intentions left vague.

Credit: Abalone Fishergirl with an Octopus by Katsukawa Shunshō (1773)

Perhaps Hokusai’s most scandalous innovation, other than his inimitable style and leaving nothing to the imagination, was the second octopus, which turns an already transgressive fantasy into a beastly threesome. There’s even dialogue between the trio of characters, scribbled in the background and easily mistaken for a squiggly abstract sky. It isn’t exactly high literature, but it certainly sets the tone of the piece…

LARGE OCTOPUS: My wish comes true at last, this day of days; finally I have you in my grasp! Your “bobo” is ripe and full, how wonderful! Superior to all others! To suck and suck and suck some more. After we do it masterfully, I’ll guide you to the Dragon Palace of the Sea God and envelop you. “Zuu sufu sufu chyu chyu chyu tsu zuu fufufuuu…”

MAIDEN: You hateful octopus! Your sucking at the mouth of my womb makes me gasp for breath! Aah! yes… it’s…there!!! With the sucker, the sucker!! Inside, squiggle, squiggle, oooh! Oooh, good, oooh good! There, there! Theeeeere! Goood! Whew! Aah! Good, good, aaaaaaaaaah! Not yet! Until now it was I that men called an octopus! An octopus! Ooh! Whew! How are you able…!? Ooh! “yoyoyooh, saa… hicha hicha gucha gucha, yuchyuu chyu guzu guzu suu suuu….”

LARGE OCTOPUS: All eight limbs to interwine with!! How do you like it this way? Ah, look! The inside has swollen, moistened by the warm waters of lust. “Nura nura doku doku doku…”

MAIDEN: Yes, it tingles now; soon there will be no sensation at all left in my hips. Ooooooh! Boundaries and borders gone! I’ve vanished….!!!!!!

SMALL OCTOPUS: After daddy finishes, I too want to rub and rub my suckers at the ridge of your furry place until you disappear and then I’ll suck some more. “chyu chyu..”

And that’s the context behind Tako to Ama. Or, as a flustered Victorian professor might say, “she’s a fisherman’s wife or something.”

I encountered this image for the first time in a neglected chapter of our art history textbook; the somewhat huffy and embarrassed teacher refused to be drawn into discussions about it and said we can read about it on our own time. So I did, and I was instantly hooked on the carnal possibilities the image portrayed. Someday, somehow, I knew that I had to bring this classic artwork to written life. “Ama and the Octopus” is the result.

This story isn’t exactly about Princess Tamatori. It instead takes her legend, Tako to Ama’s breathtaking artwork, the personalities its dialogue lends the father-son octopus duo, and several other folklore strands, such as Ryūjin’s immortal daughter Otohime and the four quarters of his aquatic kingdom, and blends them all into a new premise. Ama diver Kiku and her young brother Ren are orphans, left alone to fend for themselves until one day Kiku spies the Dragon King’s palace and a pearl that could change their lives forever. But there’s a price to be paid for such a theft, a price that Kiku and her tentacled pursuers negotiate through hours of passionate sex on a secluded beach until all three are more than eager to pay it…

It isn’t a real folk story, but it’s one that could have been real (if much more erotically charged than usual), and I’d like to think that Hokusai would have appreciated such an expansion of his famous image. I certainly hope you enjoy this tale of two octopuses, and the lusty fantasy that’s been building in the back of my mind ever since that fateful high-school art class.

Click here for the prologue!