Sorrow

A figurative [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) print exploring emotional subject matter, Sorrow likely depicts a single figure or huddled form rendered through Kitaoka's modernist vocabulary of carved planes and reduced palette. As a creative-print artist who worked in the jiga-jikoku-jizuri tradition — designing, carving, and printing his own blocks — Kitaoka treated psychological themes with the same directness he brought to his social-realist documentation of postwar Japan. Compositions of this type typically rely on simplified silhouettes against a flat or muted ground, with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations introduced sparingly to model volume. The expressive grain of the woodblock, left visible through controlled inking, substitutes for the tonal modeling associated with Western drawing. The work belongs to the strand of Kitaoka's output that grew from his exposure to wartime Manchuria and the dislocation of postwar Tokyo, where human figures often stand in for broader emotional states rather than functioning as portraits.