19

Plate 19 of Yamamoto Shoun's Women in Their Pursuits sits in the album's later stretch, where Shoun's accumulated portraits of Meiji women begin to take on a kind of choral weight. By the time a viewer reaches this sheet, the album has already trained the eye to slow down, to read posture, to register the precise drape of a kimono and the implied direction of attention. Shoun, born in Kochi in 1870 and trained in Kano and Maruyama-Shijo painting before turning to woodblock design in the early 1890s, brought a painter's restraint to the genre, favoring brushed outlines, modulated indigo and persimmon, and broad expanses of unprinted paper. His parallel album Ima Sugata (Modern Figures) documented contemporary women's dress and bearing in a similar register, while Women in Their Pursuits concentrated on what those women were actually doing. The print is preserved in the Japanese Art Open Database indexed by [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org, where the album survives as a complete digitized sequence and can be read in order. Plate 19 is one of the contributions that gives the album its credibility as a sociological as well as an aesthetic project, recording, by accumulation, the rhythms of modern Japanese feminine life in a way that few of Shoun's Meiji [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga) peers managed. Even in isolation it functions as a tender observation, but its full meaning emerges only when it is read among its siblings, as one note in a long and carefully composed song about the everyday women of an era of rapid social change. The sheet exemplifies why later collectors and historians have come to regard Shoun as a major figure in the transition from Edo ukiyo-e to twentieth-century shin hanga.