Dressing her hair

Hair-dressing subjects appear across the full span of bijin-ga history, but Kobayakawa situates this traditional motif firmly in the 1930s through the style of the hair being arranged. The moga women of his prints typically wear marcelled waves or shingled cuts rather than the elaborate shimada and marumage coiffures of ukiyo-e precedent, and the act of styling such hair — possibly with combs, pins, or a hand mirror — carries a different cultural valence than its Edo counterpart. The composition likely places the figure in three-quarter view to display both the hair's form and the model's profile, a standard bijin-ga spatial solution that Kobayakawa animates through careful attention to the angle of the head and the tension in the arms. His print designs tend toward intimate scale appropriate to the oban format, with backgrounds left open or rendered in a single flat tone to isolate the figure's psychological presence.