There is a famous 19th century woodblock-print by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) that depicts a sexual encounter between two octopuses and a female diver, popularly known in English as The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. The image is as shockingly repulsive as it is arousing, with its reprehensible seduction and union across species boundaries and the stimulation of our imagination of the potentials
of the multi-sensational caressing of an octopus’s touch (keep in mind that the suction force of just one sucker is extraordinary and can cause severe damage to skin tissue).

Taking the image as prompt to ask her own set of questions, Rachel Bailey moves past its erotic allure: What story might lie behind the woodprint? What situation might it have sprung from? What purpose might it have served? In response, she discovers a story of male human privilege and pride, of deceit and revenge, that exposes his demand to dispose over the world as intrigue that usurps the octopuses and the woman’s relationship to them for his own puropses. Thereby, Bailey challenges the world as it seems, and asks us to imagine a quite different one, a different truth, a different possible encounter with the octopuses that moves beyond coordinates of male human fantasies and expectations of appropriation and domination.

Hokusai’s image and Bailey’s version of Chiyo’s friendship with the octopuses Ichi and Tsuru draw on the same fine line between captivating fascination and reproachable otherness that the octopus seems to inhabit. But Bailey makes visible the two possible responses we can level against this other, that are already contained in Hokusai’s print (as well as the potential instrumentalization of the female and animal body by the gaze of male art and artists): we can reduce it to a functional thing for us, or we can befriend it.

Rachel Bailey is a romance author and lives with her companions (one personal hero and six rescued dogs) on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. Her research sits at the intersection of popular romance studies and literary animal studies, with a particular focus on dog characters in romance novels, a topic on which she is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Tasmania, Australia. She has written books primarily in the genres of contemporary romance and romantic comedy that have hit bestseller lists, are published in over 26 countries, and have been translated into 16 languages. — www.rachelbailey.com