Harubon, Shunpon or Enpon? The Words for Japan's Erotic Books

For adult readers: this guide discusses the historical erotic books of Japan. The images shown are covers, text pages and non-explicit prints.

Ask a Japanese dictionary for "harubon" and it will not answer. Ask it for the same two characters, spring and book, read as shunpon, and it will define a book that depicts lovemaking, give a first citation from the 1830s and list half a dozen older names. Harubon is the international trade's reading, ours included, and it is a perfectly understandable mistake. This guide untangles the words Japan used for its erotic books, from enpon and makura-zōshi to the booksellers' "wa mark", and shows what they tell us about how those books were made, lent, laughed at and kept. It is a companion to our long feature on shunga, Japan's spring pictures, and the books themselves wait in our Shunga and Hidden Arts room.

At a glance

Word	Reading	Status
Harubon	Haru (native reading) plus bon (Chinese reading)	A modern trade coinage; not in the dictionaries
Shunpon	Both characters in their Chinese readings	The dictionary word, first cited 1832 to 1836
Enpon	"Erotic book"	The Edo period's own common term
Ehon	"Meeting book", a pun on "picture book"	A period term for erotic books
Makura-zōshi, warai-bon, wajirushi	Pillow book, laughing book, wa mark	Period synonyms and trade slang

Bridge: the words behind these books are part of the new Japonisme, the meeting of street, underground and tradition set out in our manifesto on the new Japonisme and Japan's soft power.

The short answer

Harubon means "spring book", an erotic book, and it is written with the same two characters as the standard Japanese word shunpon. The difference is the reading. Shunpon reads both characters in their Chinese-derived readings, as Japanese normally does for compound words. Harubon reads the first character in its native Japanese reading, haru, the everyday word for spring, and the second in its Chinese reading, voiced from hon to bon. The result sounds natural to anyone who knows a little Japanese, which is exactly why it travelled. It is not a period term, and Edo booksellers would not have recognised it.

That does not make the word useless. Most collectors outside Japan meet these books under that name, and we use it ourselves so that readers can find them. What matters is knowing what sits behind it: a family of older terms, each with its own flavour, which this guide sets out. The broader art they belong to is mapped era by era in our history of ukiyo-e in its masters.

How harubon entered the trade

The reading is a product of translation by sight. Western catalogues of Japanese books learnt early that "spring" was the standing euphemism for sex, from shunga, spring pictures. A dealer reading the two characters on a title slip, or on a modern Japanese description, would know the first as haru and the second as hon or bon from words such as ehon, picture book. Put together, the pair produced harubon. Once the word appeared in a few descriptions it became a search term, and once it became a search term it was copied. We count 26 pieces in our current catalogue that carry harubon or enpon in their titles or tags.

The same thing has happened to other Japanese words abroad. A reading that a dictionary would call wrong becomes the reading that the market uses, and the two coexist. The lesson for a collector is simple: search for harubon, but read the description for enpon, ehon or shunpon, and for the format, the date and the completeness of the volumes. The vocabulary of the wider print world is collected in our ukiyo-e print glossary.

Two readings for every character

Japanese borrowed Chinese characters and kept two ways of reading most of them. The on reading, literally "sound reading", imitates the Chinese pronunciation; the kun reading, literally "meaning reading", attaches a native Japanese word to the character. Most characters have at least one of each. Compounds of two characters usually take two on readings: that is why the character for spring is shun in shunga and shunpon, and the character for book is hon or pon.

Mixed readings exist, and Japanese grammar has names for them. A compound that reads its first character the Chinese way and its second the native way is called a jūbako reading, after the stacked lacquer food box whose name is the classic example. The reverse, native then Chinese, is called a yutō reading, after the lacquered hot-water ewer. Harubon is, technically, a yutō reading: native haru, Chinese bon. Such readings are common in everyday words, and the voicing of the second element, hon to bon, is a regular feature of Japanese compounds. The quirk is not that harubon is impossible but that nobody in Japan ever used it for these books.

Shunpon in the dictionaries

The standard dictionaries agree. One defines shunpon as a book that depicts lovemaking in a sensational way and lists "obscene book", "secret book" and pornography as near-synonyms. The largest historical dictionary of the language gives the same definition and adds enpon as a synonym. Its first recorded use comes from a satirical description of the city of Edo written in classical Chinese and published in five parts between 1832 and 1836, in a passage that rails against such books. In other words, shunpon is itself a late word, born when the books were already two centuries old.

An encyclopaedia entry on the same word sets out the variety. Shunpon could be pictures only, text only, or text with frontispieces and illustrations; it could be a painted handscroll or a printed book disguised as a novel of the floating world or a comic sketch of the pleasure quarter. Its heyday was the Edo period, when woodblock printing matured and publishing boomed, and erotic books appeared in every style of fiction the age produced. The first great masters of ukiyo-e took up the brush for them, and from then on the books followed the history of the print.

Four dictionary entries, compared

Entry	Definition, summarised	Synonyms offered
A modern desk dictionary	A book depicting lovemaking sensationally	Obscene book, secret book, pornography
The great historical dictionary	The same; first citation 1832 to 1836	Obscene book, enpon
A national encyclopaedia	Reading matter centred on explicit scenes, in any format	Kōshokubon, makura-zōshi, warai-bon, waihon, wajirushi, enpon
An online dictionary of words	A book that depicts sexual acts	None; reading given only as shunpon

Enpon and ehon: what Edo called them

The Edo period's own commonest word was enpon, written with the character for allure or charm and the character for book. It carries a sense of glamour rather than obscenity, and it is the word most specialists prefer today. A second term, ehon, played a visual pun. The ordinary word for a picture book was written "picture" plus "book". For erotic books, publishers kept the sound but changed the first character to one meaning "meeting", so that a reader saw "meeting book" while hearing "picture book". The pun survives on title pages, and an encyclopaedia of art lists it among the standard names for erotic pictures.

Collectors also meet the word shunga used loosely for the books. Strictly, shunga are the pictures, whether single sheets, album leaves or book illustrations, and enpon are the books that contain them. Most of the finest shunga of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were in fact published as books, in two or three volumes, rather than as loose prints. That is why the encyclopaedias of art list printed books beside the famous print sets: Moronobu's book Komurasaki of 1677, Kiyonaga's twelve prints on the way of love and Utamaro's Poem of the Pillow, published in 1788 as a set of twelve. Our guide to Utamaro's bijin-ga prints follows the public side of that career.

Pillows, laughter and the wa mark

The softer names are the most revealing. Makura-zōshi, "pillow book", placed the book by the bed, and makura-e, "pillow pictures", did the same for the images. Warai-bon and warai-e, "laughing books" and "laughing pictures", describe the mood the books were meant to create, and their comedy is no accident: scenes are staged with comic timing, overheard dialogue and exaggeration. Higa, "secret pictures", and higi-ga, "pictures of secret play", describe the drawer they were kept in. Older still were osokuzu-e, a name borrowed from China, and okoe, "foolish pictures".

The trade had a code. Booksellers and pedlars called erotic books wajirushi, "the wa mark", from the first syllable of warai, laughing. A reference work notes that the term was used among booksellers and points to a kabuki play first staged in 1859, in which the code turns up in dialogue. A variant, yomi-wa, "reading wa", is also recorded. The same reference works also separate a near neighbour: abuna-e, "risky pictures", for bath scenes and glimpses of the female body that stop short of explicit lovemaking. The difference matters for anyone describing a print honestly.

The charm names belong here too. Kachi-e, "victory pictures", came from the belief that a samurai who carried erotic pictures in his armour chest would win in battle; other beliefs cast them as charms against fire. Both are explained in our shunga feature, and the lucky gods who appear in some parodies are introduced in our page on the Seven Lucky Gods.

Amorous books and the first ban

Before enpon there was kōshokubon, "books of amorous taste". The term covered the new popular fiction of love and pleasure that grew from the 1680s, after Ihara Saikaku's novel The Life of an Amorous Man appeared in 1682 and found an enormous readership. That fiction, the ukiyo-zōshi or "books of the floating world", was written in Kyoto and Osaka between the 1680s and the 1770s; the term itself first appeared in 1710 in reference to amorous or erotic works, and only later widened to cover the lives of townspeople in general. The books were illustrated by the leading artists of the day.

The authorities noticed early. An edict of 1661 had already banned kōshokubon together with books that criticised lords and samurai. The political books went underground; the amorous ones carried on with little hindrance. Real pressure came in 1722, when the Kyōhō publishing rules required official permission for every new book. From then on erotic books lost their legal standing and moved under the counter, which, as the encyclopaedias note, is precisely when they became most lavish. Our directory of woodblock print publishers lists the houses that worked on both sides of that line.

"The foremost item of the bride's trousseau; even a man cannot be without them, for they gladden the heart."

From handscroll to sleeve-sized book

Erotic books came in every format of Edo publishing, and the format tells a collector much. Painted handscrolls, the oldest form, were commissions for the wealthy and often run to twelve scenes, following a Chinese convention. Printed books were usually stitched in the Japanese pouch binding, folded sheets sewn along the open edge, and issued in sets of two or three volumes, upper, middle and lower. Folding albums, called orihon, open like a concertina and suit a run of colour plates. Single-sheet sets of twelve prints sat at the luxury end.

Size varied with purpose. The large ōban format gave colour plates room to breathe. The miniature kohon, the size of a playing card, was made to slip into a sleeve or a travelling case. Some albums were built around trick devices, shikake, such as a lift-flap that turns a polite scene into a private one. The process of carving, printing and binding is explained in our guide to the woodblock process.

Formats of the erotic book

Format	Description	What to check
Handscroll (makimono)	Painted, often twelve scenes, read right to left	Silk or paper, mounting, hand
Stitched book in volumes	Pouch binding, two or three volumes	Every volume present, original covers and title slips
Folding album (orihon)	Concertina of colour plates	Hinges, later remounting
Ōban book	Large plates, often printed to the edge	Colour freshness, trimming
Miniature (kohon)	Playing-card size, carried in a sleeve	Completeness; small books lose volumes easily
Trick album (shikake)	Lift-flaps and hidden panels	Flap intact and original

For mounting terms used on scroll formats, see our guide to kakejiku and makimono mounting.

How the books reached their readers

Few Edo readers bought books outright. Books were expensive, and the gap was filled by the kashihon-ya, the lending libraries. In 1808 Edo had 656 of them, with an estimated 100,000 or more customers, and Osaka about 300. Lenders walked set rounds carrying stacks of books taller than themselves wrapped in cloth or in a back-pack. A preface of 1802 describes the small booksellers who "sweat and run with their feet in the air, lending around the town and out to the villages for fixed days".

After the 1722 rules, erotic books vanished from shop counters but not from those rounds. The encyclopaedias record that they circulated through lending libraries and through haberdashers, who carried small goods door to door. Records of women borrowing erotic books from lenders show that women were readers too. One nickname, yomeiri-bon, "bride's book", reflects the custom of giving such books with a trousseau, and an encyclopaedia entry notes that they served as a kind of sex education. Scholars still debate whether that was their purpose or a polite pretext. The world they described is introduced on our page on the Yoshiwara, oiran and geisha.

Inside the covers: story, verse and parody

Open an Edo erotic book and the first surprise is how much of it is words. Text pages, prefaces in comic verse and long dialogues fill the spaces around the pictures. Many books were written by the leading popular authors of the day; an encyclopaedia names Tamenaga Shunsui and Shōtei Kinsui, both writers of romantic fiction, among the authors of the late golden age. Shunsui's Colours of Spring: The Plum Calendar of 1832 to 1833 defined the romance genre, and he is remembered for defying the Tenpō Reforms.

The comic fiction of the age shared the method. The sharebon, small books of pleasure-quarter manners from the 1720s, lived on dialogue and humour. The yellow-covered kibyōshi, from 1775, have been called the first purely adult comic books in Japanese: a large picture on each page, with prose and dialogue carved onto the same block to fill the spaces. Their successors, the bound gōkan, ran from about 1805 to the late nineteenth century. Erotic books borrowed every one of these tricks, which is why an enpon can read like a comic strip with footnotes.

Parody was the engine. When Edo readers devoured a serial novel that moved The Tale of Genji into the shogun's palace, erotic parodies followed; our three-volume Nise Murasaki onna Genji, offered as by Keisai Eisen, is one of them. The heroes of the Water Margin, made famous by Kuniyoshi's warrior prints, became comic lovers in Atarizakari Suikoden.

The Zen master Ikkyū, famous for poems that spoke openly of desire, lent his name to Ikkyū Zenji shoshoku mondō by Yanagawa Shigenobu II. A poet's almanac of seasonal words became a calendar of love in Fūryū iro kiyose of 1834.

The joke always depended on knowing the original, which is why the warrior prints and the erotic books share a readership.

A glossary of erotic book words

Words for Japan's erotic books and pictures

Term	Literal meaning	Use
Shunga	Spring pictures	The general term for the art
Shunpon	Spring book	Dictionary term for an erotic book, first cited 1830s
Harubon	Spring book	Modern trade reading of the same characters
Enpon	Alluring book	Common period term; preferred by specialists
Ehon (meeting book)	Pun on picture book	Period term on title pages
Kōshokubon	Book of amorous taste	Seventeenth-century fiction of love; banned 1661
Makura-zōshi, makura-e	Pillow book, pillow pictures	Everyday names
Warai-bon, warai-e	Laughing book, laughing pictures	Everyday names stressing humour
Wajirushi, yomi-wa	The wa mark, reading wa	Booksellers' code
Higa, higi-ga	Secret pictures, pictures of secret play	Formal names
Kachi-e	Victory pictures	Charm name from the armour chest
Osokuzu-e, okoe	Borrowed Chinese term; foolish pictures	Oldest names
Abuna-e	Risky pictures	Suggestive but not explicit; a separate category
Yomeiri-bon	Bride's book	Nickname from the trousseau custom

Our shelf of erotic books

Our catalogue currently holds 114 active pieces tagged or titled shunga, and 26 described as harubon or enpon. Each is described with its format, its volumes and whether it is an original edition or a later printing. Highlights include Kunisada's Kamigata koi shugyō of 1827, complete in three volumes; Hiroshige's Shunjō kari no koi of 1856; and Hokusai's Enmusubi Izumo no sugi, a work of 1822 held to be his last erotic book, here in a later printing as a folding album.

Selected erotic books on our shelves

Title	Artist or author	Format and date
Kamigata koi shugyō	Utagawa Kunisada	Three volumes, 1827
Fūryū iro kiyose	Utagawa Yoshinobu	Ōban, lower volume, 1834
Ikkyū Zenji shoshoku mondō	Yanagawa Shigenobu II	Three volumes, about 1840
Shunjō kari no koi	Utagawa Hiroshige (offered as)	Three volumes, 1856
Koi no kakehashi	Ryūsuitei Tanekiyo (text)	Miniature kohon, three volumes, late Edo
Ukiyo Genji gojūyon-jō	Utagawa Kunimori, with text by Tanekiyo	Middle and lower volumes
Tea ceremony lift-flap album	Unsigned	Miniature orihon with a shikake flap, late Edo
Kuruwa no homare	Unsigned	Twelve months in colour with silver, Meiji

Two practical notes. First, we describe every piece as an original edition, a later printing or a reproduction; the tests are set out in our guide to originals and reproductions. Second, laws on importing explicit printed matter differ by country, so please ask before ordering. The whole range sits on the Shunga and Hidden Arts shelf.

Timeline

The erotic book in Japan, in fourteen dates

Date	Event
Heian period	Painted erotic handscrolls at court; osokuzu pictures mentioned in later anthologies
1661	Edict bans kōshokubon, amorous books
1677	Moronobu's illustrated book Komurasaki
1682	Saikaku's The Life of an Amorous Man launches the fiction of the floating world
1705	A colophon names pillow pictures the foremost item of a trousseau
1710	The term ukiyo-zōshi first appears, for amorous works
1722	Kyōhō publishing rules; erotic books go under the counter
1764 to 1801	Colour printing transforms the genre; Harunobu, Kiyonaga, Utamaro
1788	Utamaro's Poem of the Pillow, a set of twelve
1791	Santō Kyōden handcuffed and his publisher fined under the Kansei Reforms
1808	Edo counts 656 lending libraries
1832 to 1836	First recorded use of the word shunpon
1859	A kabuki play uses the booksellers' code wajirushi
Late twentieth century	The trade reading harubon spreads in descriptions abroad

Where the record differs

Points of dispute

Question	One view	Another view
Is harubon wrong?	Yes: it is not a dictionary reading	It is a legitimate mixed reading that simply was not used
When harubon spread	Our estimate: late twentieth century, in the trade abroad	No documented first use; treat any date as conjecture
The bride's book	Sex education for arranged marriages	A purifying charm, or a pretext for ownership

Facts first, then our reading. The dictionary readings, the 1661 and 1722 rules and the lending-library figures are documented. The date at which harubon entered the trade is not; we offer our estimate as an estimate. Our view is that the word is harmless if it is used as a door rather than a definition.

Answered plainly

What does harubon mean?

"Spring book", an erotic book. It is a trade reading of the characters that Japanese dictionaries read as shunpon.

Is harubon a real Japanese word?

Not for these books. The reading is grammatically possible but is not recorded in the dictionaries; Edo readers said enpon, ehon, makura-zōshi or warai-bon.

What is the difference between shunga and enpon?

Shunga are the pictures; enpon are the books that contain them, usually in two or three volumes with text.

Why were they called laughing books?

Because humour was central to them: comic dialogue, parody and exaggeration run through the genre.

Were these books illegal?

They lost legal status in 1722 but circulated widely through lending libraries and pedlars until the Meiji period.

Further reading

• Hakata ningyo and their hidden undersides, for the same humour in clay.
• The oiran and tayū of the Yoshiwara, for the women at the centre of so many books.
• The Japanese Artists Bible, for the artists named here and their public work.
• Hokusai's Great Wave, impressions and editions, for how editions and later printings are judged.

References and image credits

1. Kotobank, Shunpon (Digital Daijisen; Nihon Kokugo Daijiten; Nipponica, Uda Toshihiko)
2. Kokugo Jiten Online, Shunpon
3. Kotobank, Shunga (Sekai Daihyakka, Kobayashi Tadashi; Nipponica)
4. Kotobank, Enpon
5. Kotobank, Warai-e
6. Kotobank, Kachi-e
7. Kotobank, Wajirushi
8. Kotobank, Makura-e (with abuna-e)
9. Kotobank, Kashihon-ya
10. Wikipedia (Japanese), Kashihon-ya
11. Tokyo Metropolitan Library, Edo-Tokyo Digital Museum: booksellers and lending libraries
12. Katō Yoshio, Ukiyo-e dictionary: shunga (period texts)
13. National Diet Library, Collaborative Reference Database: shunga as bridal goods
14. Ritsumeikan University Art Research Centre, Seeing shunga, reading enpon (2014)
15. Ishigami Aki, Shunga and tradition, Ritsumeikan Bungaku 630
16. Wikipedia, Kanji (on and kun readings)
17. Wikipedia (Japanese), Jūbako and yutō readings
18. Wikipedia (Japanese), Wahon (Japanese bookbinding)
19. Wikipedia, Ukiyo-zōshi
20. Wikipedia, Ihara Saikaku
21. Wikipedia, Kusazōshi
22. Wikipedia, Kibyōshi
23. Wikipedia, Sharebon
24. Wikipedia, Gōkan
25. Wikipedia, Tamenaga Shunsui
26. Wikipedia, Santō Kyōden
27. Wikipedia, E-hon
28. Wikipedia, Utamakura (Utamaro)
29. Wikipedia, Shunga
30. Wikipedia, Kyōhō Reforms
31. Wikipedia, Kansei Reforms
32. Images: Art Institute of Chicago, open access, CC0 (2007.632, 1925.1702, 1939.2141); Japonista product photographs.