This drawing is without a doubt my favorite. I had seen many of the drawings and photographs in this collection, as well as those posted to alt.sex.fetish.tickling, before seeing this one, and none came as close to my life-long fantasies. My favorite setting is different in certain details, in that the woman would be dressed in clothes special to me and the man would be running his fingertips over her clothing, but the woman's pose, the fact that the man is so calmly tickling her cunt, and the overall quality of warmth, class and realism move me in ways I find difficult to express.
The sense of realism begins with the rendering of the characters. The body shapes, facial expressions and the overall style of the man's appearance are quite ordinary. The room is also quite plain, although to one unfamiliar with Japanese culture it may look exotic.
What we have here is an old fashioned man in an old fashioned room, although both are still commonplace in modern Japan. The room and the man's attire suggest a formal setting, but it also represents a man at leisure. It is quite reasonable to expect that he wears a suit to work, drives a nice Toyota, and enjoys watching baseball as much as sumo.
Japanese S&M magazines are full of similar pictures, except for the tickling. The most common activity is for the man, or a small group of men, to be seated drinking beer or sake and munching on sashimi while gazing upon a lovely young woman such as the one here who is trussed up with her legs held widely spread. Often the man is shown dipping the bits of raw fish into the woman's vagina before eating it.
For generations men of means would hire a geisha to sit with them as they drank, as drinking alone was considered undesirable. The geisha would entertain by making conversation, telling jokes, singing songs while accompanying herself on the shamisen, and sometimes dancing. It was not a sexual encounter, more like what a western male does when he sits at the bar and talks about his troubles with the bartender.
I suspect that this setting is the seed from which such highly erotic bondage art sprouts. The geisha who entertains with her songs and jokes is transformed into a sexual being who entertains with her body, even though overt sex is not the objective. Her entertainment is in the form of a submissive plaything, placed on display, used to enhance the enjoyment of the small feast and, at times, made to suffer.
As I said, the most common activity depicted in such artwork is the male placing bits of food on her body, as if it were a platter, and especially dipping the food into her cunt before eating it. Undoubtedly that would give the food an interesting flavor, but consider how it must feel to the woman. She is tightly bound, incapable of extending the level of her stimulation, helpless to experience anything beyond a devilishly mild teasing. To appreciate this idea you must begin with the assumption that the woman wants to have sex. Only then does the setting come into focus, with the woman squirming in frustration at being teased with no hope of reaching orgasm anytime soon.
Sashimi (bits of raw fish) is eaten by dipping it into a sauce made of shoyu (soy sauce) and wasabe. Wasabe is a kind of mustard. Good wasabe burns your mouth and your nasal passages, and often brings tears to your eyes. I wonder if part of the woman's suffering is supposed to derive from the man dipping his sashimi first in the sauce, then on her cunt. The lining of the vagina and the tissue around the clit is a lot like the mucous membrane tissue inside the mouth and nasal passages, so it seems to me that wasabe ought to produce one heck of a burning sensation for the woman. The Kama Sutra mentions something similar, a paste made of oil mixed with ground chili peppers. Talk about hot sex!
That the woman is supposed to suffer is this situation is sometimes portrayed in other ways. Cats are common house pets in Japan, and have been since ancient times. Quite often a setting of this type includes a scene where a cat is allowed to lick the woman's crotch after it has been smeared with the fish. Sometimes milk is used as the enticement. In any case, the man sits and chuckles as the woman quivers in agony from the cat's tongue lapping at her clit.
Sandy Beach
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