Woman Combing her hair

A woman combing her hair is a [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) subject with a long lineage in Japanese woodblock printing, treated by Utamaro, Eishi, and later by [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) artists such as Hashiguchi Goyō and Itō Shinsui, who specialized in intimate scenes of grooming and the toilette. Tokuriki, primarily known for landscapes and architectural views, occasionally turned to figure subjects, and this print likely depicts a seated or kneeling woman with a long fall of hair, a comb in hand, before a small mirror or in an interior space. The genre's compositional conventions—an asymmetrical placement of the figure, broad reserved areas of patterned or plain ground, attention to the kimono's textile design—translate directly into the strengths of mokuhanga, with multiple blocks carrying flat color fields and a finer key block defining the contours of face, hand, and hair. The work situates Tokuriki within the twentieth-century continuation of bijin-ga across both the shin-hanga and [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) movements.