20

Plate 20 from Yamamoto Shoun's serial album Women in Their Pursuits sits well into the second half of the set, by which point Shoun has thoroughly established the rhythms and visual logic of the project. As with the surrounding sheets, the image isolates one woman in the act of an ordinary task, framing her against a generous expanse of paper so that her posture, clothing, and concentration can be examined without distraction. Shoun, born in Kochi in 1870 and trained in Kano and Maruyama-Shijo painting before turning to woodblock design in the 1890s, brought the painterly economy of those classical schools into the printed page, favoring brushed outlines that taper and swell like calligraphy and a restrained color palette built from indigo, persimmon, and warm gray. Within the larger field of Meiji [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga), his choice of subject was quietly radical: rather than the staged courtesans of Edo prints, he depicted the middle-class women of contemporary Tokyo and its hinterlands, the same modern women he would also celebrate in his renowned companion album Ima Sugata (Modern Figures). The print survives in the Japanese Art Open Database indexed by [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org, where the entire Women in Their Pursuits sequence has been digitized in correct order to allow for serial reading. Plate 20 contributes to that sequence's cumulative effect, suggesting that Meiji women's daily activity was a subject inexhaustible enough to support an album of more than two dozen plates. It is the kind of image that benefits from being viewed alongside its siblings, and in that context it confirms Shoun's reputation as one of the most humane chroniclers of Meiji-era life.