Girl Combing her hair

This second impression of the comb subject represents a variant within Tokuriki's recurring exploration of a single domestic motif, a practice common among [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) artists who treated repeat subjects as opportunities to test color combinations and printing variants. The girl, focused inward on the act of grooming, presents an introspective counterpoint to the [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) subjects that dominated his commercial output. Treatments of this kind rely on careful registration to align the small comb against the dark hair mass, and on the contrast between the figure's worked surface and the flat plane of the surrounding paper. The carving of the hair employs short parallel cuts to suggest individual strands, while the kimono pattern is rendered through separate color blocks in the registered [nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e) tradition. As with much sosaku-hanga figural work from the postwar decades, the subject combines references to classical [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) compositions with a simplified, modern handling — Tokuriki was teaching at the Kyoto School of Painting through this period, and his pedagogical interest in figure construction shows through.