Sleeping Woman

A bijin-ga of a reclining female figure in repose, a subject Mori treated repeatedly across his career and one with a long lineage in Japanese figural printmaking, from Edo erotica to shin-hanga genre studies. The print is built on Mori's kappazuri-derived graphic system: continuous heavy black contours containing flat areas of opaque color, with patterning on the futon, kimono, or screen rendered through repeated planar units rather than illusionistic shading. Bokashi gradient is absent in favor of sharp boundaries between zones of color, a vocabulary Mori carried over from the katazome stencil-dyeing tradition associated with Keisuke Serizawa and the mingei movement. The body is described through the silhouette of the bedding and the angle of the head rather than through anatomical modeling. Mori carved and printed each impression himself on washi, in accordance with the sosaku-hanga commitment to single-author production from drawing through final pull.