Sleepy Family — ねむたいきょうだい

Sleepy Family (ねむたいきょうだい, Nemutai kyōdai — literally Sleepy Siblings) is an F12 woodblock print catalogued under Kasamatsu Mihoko on [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org. The title and probable subject — small children together in a state of drowsiness — places the print firmly in a postwar Japanese pictorial tradition of intimate domestic scenes featuring children, a tradition that runs from Hashiguchi Goyō's prewar studies of women and babies through Iwata Sentarō's gentle child portraits to a number of women printmakers active from the 1960s onward.

The choice of subject is itself significant. Where prewar [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) publishers tended to favor a relatively narrow set of marketable motifs — geisha, kabuki actors, famous landscapes, and seasonal beauties — postwar sōsaku-hanga artists, working outside that commercial framework, could turn to subjects drawn from their own households. Sleeping children, family pets, and quiet domestic interiors became plausible subjects in a way that they rarely had been in earlier woodblock practice. Mihoko's Sleepy Family fits this pattern and reads as a personal observation rather than a commissioned design.