Bookplate design [woman playing shamisen]

A woman playing the shamisen — the three-stringed lute at the center of traditional Japanese musical culture — appears in this bookplate design from Yumeji's Taisho-era illustrated book work. Bookplate designs were a significant portion of Yumeji's commercial output, his distinctive style lending itself naturally to the small-format, intimate context of the bookplate. The shamisen player is a figure from the world of traditional entertainment culture — geisha, folk music, the pleasure quarters — updated in Yumeji's treatment with a distinctly modern emotional interiority.