"The Form of a Demon and the Heart of a Person"

Summary

In these prints, little but the untamed eyebrows and shaggy hair — rendered strand by strand in a true carver’s coup de maître — remain to remind viewers of Yamauba’s status as a social outcast. One may well ask, looking at Yamauba’s fine robes and delicate features, what, if any, of her original monstrousness remains. Indeed, some scholars, writing on the series, are content to explain Utamaro’s depiction of a youthful Yamauba as a way of smuggling sensual content under the censor’s nose, pointing to several images where she is shown bare-chested as she breastfeeds her son or attends to her toilet. But these pieces constitute a minority of the series; in any case, exposed breasts are not inherently erotic. What’s more, Utamaro had no problem publishing much more explicit prints during his lifetime, sometimes using aliases that barely differed from his normal nom de pinceau. When the artist did finally run afoul of censorship toward the end of his life, in a much-publicized scandal that led to his brief imprisonment, it was for the political sensitivities of his work, not its salaciousness per se.