Dear Don,

I am resending the mail I sent 30 hours (?) ago. It seems to be missing.

Best, Akiko

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I found Don's interpretation convincing. It is probable that VN was meaning by "the contrast between the fictitious and the factual" those blank faces of the people sexually excited drawn in Japanese shunga.

It is very interesting to know how VN and the Westerners see those blank faces. Now I know the reason why I could not relate "Far Eastern sexual customs" with them. I think such faces are the stylized ones showing sexual ecstasy, not masking it. They are particular to shunga like the writhing foot fingers. But I know very little about Japanese erotic prints, which tend to strike me as "exotic," as they would the Westerners. I may be wrong in assuming something about the genre of art, which has been more highly evaluated in the West than in Japan. I do not know much about the literary pornography of 18th century either, but judging from a few pieces I read, characters are rather talkative while making love (they talk about their pleasure, not about their acquaintances or politics, etc), far from concealing their sexual pleasure. I do not think they had such kind of sexual etiquette.

Akiko

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EDNOTE. Akiko's Note calls attention to VN's (or Mr. R's) remark about "Far Eastern sexual customs" and ponders what customs these might be. A couple of passages from ADA (cited below) offer some clarification. VN apparently illustrates the "fictitious" and the "factual" distinction by reference to old Japanese prints such as the one I have attached. Although it is not particularly evident in this example, an examination of erotic shunga and ukiyo-e prints shows that the faces of the participants, especially females in frenzied couplings, very often display no emotion. This disjunction of strong emotion and stolid expression is presumably what VN has in mind in his account of Armande's sexual protocol. Although I know very little about such matters I would hazard that the Japanese dichotomy may be in some part a by-product of the limitations of woodblock printing as well as local traditions of sexual etiquette. Perhaps those better informed could enlighten us.

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ADA passages:

The collection of Uncle Dan’s Oriental Erotica prints turned out to be artistically second-rate and inept calisthenically. In the most hilarious, and expensive, picture, a Mongolian woman with an inane oval face surmounted by a hideous hair-do was shown communicating sexually with six rather plump, blank-faced gymnasts in what looked like a display window jammed with screens, potted plants, silks, paper fans and crockery. Three of the males, contorted in attitudes of intricate discomfort, were using simultaneously three of the harlot’s main orifices; two older clients were treated by her manually, and the sixth, a dwarf, had to be contented with her deformed foot. Six other voluptuaries were sodomizing her immediate partners, and one more had got stuck in her armpit. Uncle Dan, having patiently disentangled all those limbs and belly folds directly or indirectly connected with the absolutely calm lady (still retaining somehow parts of her robes), had penciled a note that gave the price of the picture and identified it as: ‘Geisha with 13 lovers.’ Van located, however, a fifteenth navel thrown in by the generous artist but impossible to account for anatomically.

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‘— took place at coincident dates, we were just ordinary sisters, exchanging routine nothings, having little in common, she collecting cactuses or running through her lines for the next audition in Sterva, and I reading a lot, or copying beautiful erotic pictures from an album of Forbidden Masterpieces that we found, apropos, in a box of korsetov i khrestomatiy (corsets and chrestomathies) which Belle had left behind, and I can assure you, they were far more realistic than the scroll-painting by Mong Mong, very active in 888, a millennium before Ada said it illustrated Oriental calisthenics when I found it by chance in the corner of one of my ambuscades.