Nude Combing her hair

The motif of a woman dressing her hair — kamiyui — has a long lineage in [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga), from Utamaro's [hashira-e](/glossary/hashira-e) through Hashiguchi Goyo's [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) refinements. Mori reframes the subject in his graphic vocabulary: the body is a continuous silhouette, the cascading hair a single black mass against the unworked ground, and the comb a small geometric accent. Stripped of kimono pattern, the print foregrounds drawing — the disposition of contour and negative space — over decorative density. This makes the nude subjects within Mori's output formally distinct from his clothed figures, where textile pattern usually dominates the surface. The image participates in a postwar engagement with the female nude that several [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) artists pursued in dialogue with European modernism, while remaining anchored in Japanese pictorial conventions. The seated, self-absorbed pose declines the viewer's gaze, a compositional decision that descends from late-eighteenth-century bijin-ga through to twentieth-century reinterpretations. Within Mori's body of work it represents a quieter register than his theatrical or festival subjects, closer in spirit to the meditative figure studies pursued by other sosaku-hanga printmakers.