Go out of doors — 外へ

Go out of doors (外へ, Soto e) is an F6 woodblock print catalogued on [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org under Kasamatsu Shirō, although in subject and format it shares a great deal with works attributed to his daughter Mihoko, and dealers have at times associated the design with the next generation of the Kasamatsu studio. Like A bloom at the windows from the same dealer series, the title — meaning literally to head outside — frames an intimate, slightly narrative subject that lies at some remove from the panoramic landscape vision of prewar [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga).

The phrasing of the title in Japanese, soto e, suggests a small domestic moment: someone, or something, on the threshold of stepping out. In the postwar sōsaku-hanga tradition, such modest narrative titles became increasingly common, replacing the older convention of naming a print after the geographical site depicted. The shift mirrors a wider change in subject matter, away from the views of famous places (meisho) that had defined nineteenth-century ukiyo-e and toward the everyday and the observed.