A frontispiece of a novel, 1904

A frontispiece for a novel published in 1904 — three years after the 1901 frontispiece, showing Hanko's sustained engagement with literary illustration across the Meiji period. By 1904, the kuchi-e art form had reached its peak in terms of both technical refinement and cultural prestige, with the leading illustrators of the day — Hanko, Toshikata, and others — producing works of extraordinary delicacy for the literary magazines. The 1904 print likely depicts a female figure in the shaded, psychologically complex mode that characterized Hanko's mature bijin-ga style.