meshimori (), a term for maidservants at inns who also worked as prostitutes. Print No. 11 A plump older couple have sex on the floor; the woman pulls a blanket over the man. Kiyoshi Shibui believed the print displayed a taste Utmamaro had in corpulent women; Yoshikazu Hayashi countered that such figures were so rare in Utamaro's print as to make such a thing unlikely. Print No. 12 The print is rare in presenting two Westerners having sex; other prints from the era that depict foreigners normally have a foreign male with a Japanese female. The print appeared when the Dutch East India Company was still making trips to Japan; they normally arrived in spring, which brought the Dutch arrivals associations with the erotic connotations of spring, as in the term shunga (, "spring picture[s]"). For diplomatic reasons, few such pictures appeared before 1790, after which the Company's visits ended. They stayed at the Nagasakiya inn in the Hongoku-chō neighbourhood in the Nihonbashi district of Edo, and many stopped by to take a look at the foreigners. Utamaro may have seen Dutch people on one of these visits, and thus may have based the man's portrait on observation; women on the other hand were rare visitors to Japan, and the woman's garb is anachronistic. The man's face is shaded using bokashi. The print receives such attention to detail that even the head of the penis is dusted with mica to give it a glittering effect. The artist Kitao Masanobu remarked on the enormity of the penises Utamaro drew; the French art critic Edmond de Goncourt, on the other hand, praised Utamaro's "power in the line, which makes the drawing of a penis the equal of the Louvre's Hand by Michelangelo". Legacy Utamakura has gained a reputation as the first of Utamaro's three most representative erotic books, with Negai no Itoguchi (1799) and Ehon Komachi-biki (1802), and established Utamaro's status as a master of the genre. De Goncourt called Utamakura "Utamaro's most beautiful erotic book". Notes References Works cited Further reading 1788 books Shunga Works by Kitagawa Utamaro Illustrated books