This is the London Review of Books podcast. Regular programming will resume next week. In the meantime,

for the third of our summer readings from the archive, we have Amir Srinivazan reading her piece on

Octopus Intelligence from 2017. The Sucker, the Sucker. Other Minds, the Octopus and the Evolution

of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey Smith,

and The Soul of an Octopus, a surprising exploration into the wonder of consciousness by Cy Montgomery.

In 1815, 15 years before he made his most famous print, The Great Wave,

Haukusai published three volumes of erotic art.

In one of them, there is a woodcut print known in English as

The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, and in Japanese as Takotoama, Octopus and Shell Diver.

It depicts a naked woman lying on her back, leg spread, and eyes

closed, while a huge red octopus performs conalinguists on her. The octopus's slit eyes bulge

between the woman's legs and its suckered limbs wrap around her writhing body. A second, smaller octopus, inserts its beak into

the woman's mouth, while curling the thin tip of an arm around her left nipple. In Europe,

the print was interpreted as a scene of rape, but the critics didn't read Japanese. In the text

arranged in the space around the three entwined bodies,

the shell diver exclaims, You hateful octopus. You're sucking at the mouth of my womb makes me

gasp for breath. Ah, yes, it's there. With the sucker, the sucker, there, there. Until now, it was I that men called an

octopus. An octopus. How are you able? Oh, boundaries and borders gone. I'm vanished.

The octopus threatens boundaries. Its body, a boneless mass of soft tissue, has no fixed shape.

Even large octopuses, the largest species, the giant Pacific, has an arm span of more than six

meters and weighs 100 pounds, can fit through an opening an inch wide or about the size of its

eye. This, combined with their considerable strength,

...