This revised and expanded second edition of Timon Screech’s definitive Sex and the Floating World offers a new assessment of the genre of erotic Japanese paintings and prints known as shunga. Changes in Japanese law in the 1990s enabled such images to be published without fear of prosecution, and many shunga picture-books have since appeared. Shunga prints are not like any other form of picture for the simple fact that they are overtly about sex.