Six Months of Dreaming

Charlotte Cory’s latest novel, SIX MONTHS OF DREAMING, published March 2025, tells the story of Yutaka Kajikawa, an ambitious young Japanese artist who hopes to find success with his ‘Jazz Age’ necktie designs in the West.  In the summer of 1929 he hears that the celebrated English aristocratic journalist, the extravagantly named Lady Grace Marguarite Hay Drummond-Hay, is visiting Japan on the much vaunted, somewhat perilous (some might say foolish!)  first Round the World Flight of an airship, the LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin.  He feels Destiny is taking a hand.  His chance of becoming the greatest Japanese textile designer in the world has arrived.  Although he lives outside Osaka and cannot find the money or time to travel to Tokyo to witness the arrival of the airship, he resolves to write to the English Lady, care/of the airport at Lake Kasumigaura, an hour and a half east of Tokyo where the airship is scheduled to land, explaining his artistic ambitions and asking for her help in realising his hopes.   He encloses twenty examples of his designs for men’s neckties and says that even if she does nothing for him, by writing and sending his letter, he will enjoy six months of dreaming…

We know that Lady Grace Drummond-Hay did nothing for him.  History does not record what happened to Yutaka Kajikawa but this is his story, as imagined by CHARLOTTE CORY.  By chance the author found his letter and fourteen out of his twenty designs at a sale of pictures in London.  Moved by the beauty of his work and the passion of his letter, she decided to make the young Japanese artist’s dream come true across the far side of the globe, as he wished and nearly a century on because “this is essentially the story of any and every young artist who has plenty of talent, is happy to work hard and wants to get on in the world – but has no idea how to do so…”

The book’s cover shows the ordinary brown, long thin envelope in which he sent his remarkably moving letter together with his twenty folded necktie designs to Lady Drummond-Hay.  The number 204 scrawled in blue crayon refers to the room at the Imperial Hotel where she stayed during the stop-over in Tokyo and where presumably all the letters waiting for her arrival were despatched.  It is fun to think that Yutaka Kajikawa himself licked and stuck down those stamps…

Limitedition Press 224pp
Paperback
ISBN 9781739511388
115 x 217mm