Portrait of the novelist A. Nagayo

Nagayo Yoshiro (here identified as "A. Nagayo") was among the distinguished Japanese writers of the interwar period, and this woodblock portrait — distinct from but related to the more formal "sensei zo" portrait — renders him in a more intimate register. Kitaoka's approach to the portrait of an admired literary figure reflects the traditional Japanese artist-writer alliance, the printmaker offering his likeness as both tribute and interpretation. The novelist's face becomes a compositional problem resolved through the woodblock's particular logic of simplified form.