A Sad Woman

A woman with a look of quiet sorrow — the face drawn down, the shoulders slightly curved, the posture communicating inward collapse without melodrama — embodies the Yumeji-style bijin at her most characteristic in this undated print. Yumeji's sad women were not tragic figures from literature or history but unnamed modern women feeling the unnamed weight of Taisho-era romantic disappointment. Their universality was the secret of their cultural resonance: any woman who had felt this feeling could find herself in the figure.