Departure of a Family

A family in motion — adults and children carrying their possessions, leaving one place for another — appears in this print whose title suggests departure and dispersal. The subject resonates with Kitaoka's own experience of repatriation but may also reflect the broader postwar displacement of millions across Asia. The figures are rendered with the simplified, urgent line of his early figurative work: bodies weighted by loads, children held close, the group moving together with the collective purposefulness of people who have no choice but to go.