Longing for Home (Bokyo)

Longing for Home (Bokyo), 1959, edition 3 of 50, depicts the fundamental emotional experience of the person far from home: the mountain climber's nostalgia for valley warmth, or perhaps the wartime experience of distance from Japan that had marked Azechi's own Manchurian years. Homesickness in his visual language would appear as a figure in repose or withdrawal, the body turned inward rather than outward toward the mountain, emotion compressed into the simplified forms of his folk-art style.