Whirlpools at Seto

A treatment of the tidal whirlpools that form in the narrow Naruto Strait between Awaji Island and Shikoku, a meisho subject Hokusai had handled in his 1830s 'Famous Places of the Provinces' series. Kitaoka approaches the motif through a [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) sensibility rather than [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) convention: the swirling water is rendered as concentric carved arcs and overlapping curved planes rather than the linear wave patterns of nineteenth-century work. Whirlpool prints of this kind exploit the woodblock's capacity for repeated curvilinear gouging, with the carved channels reading as white lines against pooled indigo and prussian-blue ink. The composition typically suppresses horizon and shoreline, locking the viewer's eye into the vortex and emphasizing surface pattern over deep space — a flattening strategy consistent with Kitaoka's broader landscape practice from the 1960s and 1970s.