Artist Unknown Kintoki and Yamauba, ca. 1804 Published by Nishimuraya Yohachi (Eijudo) Nishiki-e (color woodblock print) Oban format Signed: Utamaro Museum Collection Utamaro is more erotically classical, more sinuously serene, more calmly in love with women than later masters like Kuniyoshi and Yoshitoshi. But he too is psychologically expressive, if one really looks. Yamauba was half-woman, half-spirit, a good demonic female who rescued the abandoned infant Kintoki and raised him in the mountains. Supernaturally strong, Kintoki was the Edenic playmate to animals and spirits and he grew up to be a great hero. The half-wild Yamauba coddled Kintoki the way Japanese men in the pleasure district liked to be coddled. The flip-side of male swagger is the enduring need to be mothered. But Yamauba may also be seen as proof that the spirit-power of woman was not always dreaded. There is such a thing as a good wildness, the intimate protective wildness of this mother and her adopted child-a contrast to the compartmentalized and rigid world of convention.