Job and his wife

Dated 1966, Job and his wife — depicting the scene from the Book of Job in which Job, afflicted with loss and disease, sits in his suffering while his wife urges him to "curse God and die" — is among Watanabe's most humanly complex Biblical subjects. The couple's interaction, charged with grief, desperation, and the difference between their responses to suffering, creates a dramatic tableau in which the katazome technique's bold colors give both figures equal visual weight. Job's patient endurance and his wife's anguished impatience are both rendered with human dignity.