Outskirt of a Village (Mura hazure)

"Outskirt of a Village" (Mura hazure) from 1969 — one of Kitaoka's favorite subjects — captures the transitional zone between built settlement and open countryside. The village outskirts are a liminal landscape: the last houses giving way to fields and paths, the compact geometry of village buildings dissolving into the more open, irregular forms of agricultural land. Edition 38/50 indicates a small, carefully controlled print run. Kitaoka renders this threshold zone with the formal attention it deserves as a distinctively Japanese landscape type.