Young woman in a knit cap

A portrait of a contemporary young woman wearing a knit cap places this print firmly in the modernist register that distinguished sosaku-hanga from its ukiyo-e antecedents. Where Edo-period bijin-ga depicted idealized courtesans in traditional dress, Hiratsuka and his contemporaries drew their portrait subjects from everyday modern life — friends, family, students, neighbors — and treated them with the same disciplined black-and-white woodcut vocabulary they applied to landscapes and architecture. The knit cap suggests a Western or post-Meiji garment and likely a winter setting. Hiratsuka would have carved the face and cap in flat planes of black ink with crisp white reserves marking the contours of features, hair, and knit texture, eschewing the gradient bokashi shading favored by shin-hanga portraitists such as Hashiguchi Goyo. The result reads less as a likeness and more as a study in graphic structure — how a face can be reduced to its essential carved relief without sacrificing presence. Portraits of this kind formed a recurring strand within Hiratsuka's varied output of more than 3,000 prints.