Embracing

Embracing depicts two figures locked together in close physical contact, a subject Mori treated with the same directness he applied to warriors and kabuki actors rather than with the veiled eroticism of Edo-period shunga. The composition is presumably built from interlocking silhouettes — overlapping arms, kimono folds, opposed heads — defined by the heavy black contour line carried over from his earlier kappazuri stencil work under Serizawa Keisuke. Color is typically restricted to a few flat, hand-printed planes on absorbent washi, with pattern on the garments reduced to graphic repeats rather than the layered bokashi of polychrome nishiki-e. The print belongs to the strand of Mori's output devoted to private rather than public moments, set against the more numerous musha-e and festival subjects that defined his commercial profile from the 1950s onward. As a sosaku-hanga artist he carved and printed the blocks himself, and the visible hand of the baren on the sheet is part of the work's intended character.