Setting Sail

Setting Sail is a semi-autobiographical novel by the Taisho-era Japanese painter and poet Yumeji Takehisa (1884–1934). It was first serialized in the Tokyo newspaper Miyako Shimbun from May 2 to September 12, 1927 (Showa 2), in 134 installments, each published in the distinctive format of one text and one illustration, with the illustrations drawn by Takehisa himself to accompany the text. The novel was not published in book form until after the author's death, and from 1940 onward Aoi Shobo and other publishers issued multiple editions. The work centers on the painter Santaro, following his life as he travels between Tokyo and Kyoto with his young son Yamahiko: his painting career, exhibitions, theater troupes, and the literary and artistic circles of the cafes, as well as his tangled and difficult relationships with women—his wife Misao, his kindred spirit Yoshino, and the strong-willed Ohana. Much of the book is based on real events, and the story's timeframe roughly spans from Taisho 3 to Taisho 14—the years when Takehisa was between thirty and forty-one. Santaro is Takehisa himself, and Misao, Yamahiko, Yoshino, and Ohana all have real-life prototypes. The novel is therefore both a self-account of half a lifetime's travels and a confession colored by justification and embellishment—truth and fiction permeate each other throughout. The book carries on the aesthetic of the "Yumeji-style beauty": large round eyes, long slender eyelashes, fragile, easily broken figures, which mirror the melancholy and sorrow in the text. The simplified Chinese edition was translated by Wang Weixing and published by New Star Press in 2012 in the "New Classic Library" series, with illustrations and plates and a preface by Zhi An.