Price available upon request. This piece is currently being reviewed for museum acquisition; serious inquiries from private collectors welcome.
This appears to be a fantastic antique Japanese erotic manuscript, most likely from the Edo period (1603–1868). A few things point to that:
*The text is written in kuzushiji / hentaigana — the cursive "flowing" script used before Japanese writing was standardized around 1900. It's very hard to read even for most modern Japanese speakers.
*The paper is washi (handmade Japanese paper), and the binding style with the brass fastener and worn edges is consistent with a well-handled old booklet.
*It's continuous prose in kana, consistent with a popular-audience Edo text meant to be read aloud or easily, typical of erotic/instructional booklets.
*The punctuation dots (、) breaking the lines are a period feature.
*The vocabulary: つび (a period slang term for female g*nitals), つくぼ/めぐろ referring to anatomical parts, verbs like すりくり ("rub"), いれる ("insert"), つかむ ("grip"), the instructional "-せよ / -すすめ" command forms... is unambiguous. This is a sexual technique / instructional text, the enpon (erotic manual) register you suspected, describing manual stimulation step by step. The anatomical line drawings illustrate the passage. That firmly places it as shunga-adjacent instructional material, almost certainly Edo period.
This object belongs to a tradition called shunga (春画, literally "spring pictures", "spring" was a euphemism for sex). More specifically, the booklet format is called an enpon (艶本 / 艶本, "erotic book"), which was the most common way shunga circulated, far more than the single famous prints people think of today. These works were widely circulated during the Edo period and formed an accepted part of popular visual culture. This one, with its instructional text and anatomical drawings, sits at the "manual" end of the genre rather than the purely pictorial end.
On the timeline: the roots go back much further than the Edo period. As early as the 700s, the courtier class had handscrolls with explicit illustrations, and by the 17th century woodblock printing had emerged, making it easier to distribute the work quickly and widely. The Japanese tradition was also shaped from abroad, early Chinese sex manuals influenced Japanese erotic art, which is relevant to your booklet specifically, since the "how-to" register you're looking at descends partly from those imported medical/instructional texts rather than only from the pictorial ukiyo-e (the pleasure-seeking urban culture of Edo-period Japan) line.
What makes the genre historically interesting is how mainstream it was. Despite being disapproved of by the military government, it was popular with all social classes during the Edo period. It wasn't a fringe underground product: newlyweds sometimes received shunga for educational purposes, samurai carried the illustrations into battle as lucky charms, and married couples kept books at home to view with visiting friends. Traveling lending libraries even brought the art to rural areas. That lending-library detail is worth holding onto, it's part of why so many of these survive in worn, well-thumbed condition like this one.
The legal backdrop matters for dating and for why explicit material kept being produced anyway. There were repeated governmental attempts to suppress shunga; the first was a Tokugawa edict in 1661 banning erotic books known as kōshokubon ("lewdness books"). The various bans only had the effect of driving an already-prolific trade clandestine. So production continued underground through the 18th and 19th centuries, which is the window your booklet most likely comes from.
The famous shunga are luxury woodblock-printed books by named ukiyo-e masters: Utamaro's Utamakura (1788), Hokusai's work, and so on. This one is hand-drawn/hand-copied rather than a fine printed edition, the ink line is freehand and the text is a personal cursive hand, not carved type. That suggests it's a vernacular, possibly privately copied instructional manuscript in the enpon tradition, rather than a commercial art-print edition. That's common: alongside the deluxe printed books there was a large body of cheaper hand-copied erotic/instructional material that ordinary people made and passed around. It's less valuable as "art" than a signed printed Utamaro, but arguably more interesting as a social document... it's the everyday, functional end of the tradition.
14 pages
7.5in x 5in
Carrying the soft patina that only time can give. Sold as a historical art object, expect imperfections due to age and the hand-drawn nature of this fantastic piece of history.
