Beauty and sadness

The title echoes Yasunari Kawabata's novel "Utsukushisa to Kanashimi to" (Beauty and Sadness, 1965), and the print belongs to Sekino's body of bijin-ga — single-figure studies of women that updated the Edo-period genre for a modern sensibility. The composition likely presents a seated or standing female figure, the face rendered with the specific, individualized features that distinguish Sekino's portraiture from the type-based bijin of ukiyo-e. Hair and kimono pattern would be carved with close attention to line and texture, while the ground might be left as a flat field of muted color or unmodulated washi. As a sosaku-hanga artist Sekino designed, cut, and printed the blocks himself, and in his portrait work he frequently sought psychological presence over decorative idealization — an emphasis that connects this image to his portraits of writers, performers, and craftsmen, and to a postwar reframing of bijin-ga as a vehicle for inwardness rather than display.