It was from the time of Manet that Japanese art began to inspire the Europeans to apply fresh ideas through a change of style and taste, which was going to be the basis for Impressionism and what developed from it. The important impact of Japanese art on the old continent provided a link between the aesthetic conceptions of each of these two worlds. Our interest in eroticism dates back to the Golden Age of Greco-Latin pottery, but the freedom of expression displayed by the Japanese in this field was to impress itself to a considerable extent on the artists of the old continent by rousing their sensitivity to this subject. The erotic works reproduced in this volume are called Shunga, ‘springpictures’; a name which evokes initiatory serenity linked with the rebirth of nature. Classical Japanese literature abounds in descriptions of sexual relations, as is borne out by Gengi monogatari, the very famous Tale of Gengi, the work of a lady of the Court, Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote it about the year 1000. It is the first novel, and one of the most important, in Japanese literature, outstanding also in its length, with 4234 pages divided into 54 chapters, 44 of which are taken up with an enumeration of the happy and less happy love affairs of the handsome prince Gengi. From the horizontal roll, the makemono, the presentation of manuscripts developed towards what present-day publishers call an offprint, with the twelve separate illustrations of Tosa Misunobu (1434-1525). This kind of reproduction was widely used for the polychrome wood engravings carried out by the artists of the Ukiyo-e. Sexual manuals were numerous and widely circulated throughout the country, as the primitive society of lords and warriors saw the merchant and bourgeois class constantly growing.