Nude Combing her hair

The motif of a woman dressing her hair — kamiyui — has a long lineage in ukiyo-e bijin-ga, from Utamaro's hashira-e through Hashiguchi Goyo's 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 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.