Design for the cover of the songlet Flying Island

The cover design for the songlet "Flying Island" — created around 1930 as Yumeji's career was in its final phase — shows him working at the intersection of music, poetry, and visual art that characterized the Taisho cultural world he had helped define. Yumeji designed covers and illustrations for music publications throughout his career, his distinctive visual style lending an immediately recognizable character to songs and lyrics published under his imprimatur. The "Flying Island" title suggests the fantastical, the airborne, the world of wish and imagination that Yumeji inhabited as an artist.