Erotica; Compendium Guide to the Brothels of Osaka (Keiryaku ōzassho gyokumon taisei) 閨暦大雑書玉門大成

Erotica; Compendium Guide to the Brothels of Osaka, also known as Keiryaku ōzassho gyokumon taisei, is an illustrated book associated with Kitao Shigemasa in the holdings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Published around 1765 and held with related Edo ukiyo-e books, the volume provides a guide to the licensed pleasure quarters of Osaka, combining textual information about houses and their courtesans with shunga-style illustrations that engaged the period's frank curiosity about urban sexuality. Such guides circulated widely in the eighteenth century in both Edo and the Kamigata region around Kyoto and Osaka, and they reveal the close imbrication of printed culture, urban geography, and the regulated sex trade. As founder of the Kitao school, Shigemasa worked across many genres, including shunga, and his contributions to books like this one show a confident hand in figure drawing, an awareness of architectural and interior settings, and a willingness to participate in publishing projects that were sometimes considered legally risky under Tokugawa censorship regimes. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves the work within its larger collection of Japanese illustrated books, where it documents both the lighter and the more transgressive corners of Edo period publishing. Within Shigemasa's career, the book belongs to a stream of his output that intersected with the literary, satirical, and erotic publishing world of his time, an output that has been more openly studied by recent scholarship. The volume's interest lies as much in its cultural sociology, the way it imagined and merchandized Osaka's brothel districts, as in its place within the technical history of Edo ukiyo-e bookmaking.