Fortune-telling

The subject likely depicts a divination scene (uranai), a recurring motif in Taisho-era genre imagery that combined traditional folk practices with modern street-corner fortune-tellers. Yumeji's treatment would isolate one or two figures — typically a young woman consulting or receiving a reading — against a sparingly described setting, rendering the encounter as a small psychological vignette rather than a documentary record. The mokuhanga production would employ a limited palette and the washi-and-baren tradition, while the linear style and figural proportions register Yumeji's hybrid debt to Aubrey Beardsley and Art Nouveau illustration. Fortune-telling held particular resonance for Yumeji's audience of young women navigating the romantic uncertainties of Taisho urban life, and the subject aligns with his broader catalogue of small emotional dramas — partings, longings, quiet anticipations — that gave his prints their distinctively melancholic flavor and helped define the Taisho Roman sensibility.