Long-sleeves kimono

This bijin-ga depicts a young woman in a furisode, the long-sleeved kimono traditionally worn by unmarried women, with sleeves that hang well below the waist and provide a substantial decorative field for woven or dyed pattern. In mokuhanga, such a garment offers the printmaker a structural advantage: large, relatively flat areas of patterned color that can be built up through multiple impressions of separate color blocks, contrasted against the finer keyblock work used for face, hands, and hair. The composition typically emphasizes the silhouette of the standing or seated figure, with the sleeves either falling vertically or swept by an implied movement. Within Takasawa Keiichi's output, the long-sleeves print sits alongside his nude and hair studies as evidence of an artist working across the established subject types of twentieth-century Japanese printmaking, here engaging directly with the bijin-ga lineage in modern sōsaku-hanga form.