Bijin and hat box

A bijin carries or examines a hat box — a marker of modern consumer culture and urban femininity in Taisho Japan — in this composition that situates Yumeji's characteristic melancholy woman within the material world of the early twentieth century. The hat box suggests shopping, an outing, the pleasures and anxieties of modern commercial life, and the bijin's ambiguous expression — interested but not entirely happy — reflects the Yumeji-style equation of beauty and unease that made his figures so emotionally resonant to contemporary audiences.