895.6'35—dc2l

99–088699

Design by Laura Hammond Hough

Cover design by Charles Rue Woods

Cover illustration by Paul D’Innocenzo

Grove Press

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

01 02 03 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Night and Night's Travelers

Love Songs

Asleep

Night and Night's Travelers

Dear Sarah,

It was spring when we went to see my brother off. He and his girlfriends were waiting at the airport when we arrived—yes, he had lots of girlfriends back then—and they were all decked out like flowers. The sky was marvelously clear . . .

The flood of memories that streamed over me when this draft of an old letter emerged from the depths of one of my drawers was so powerful that for a few moments I stopped cleaning and just sat still. I read through the English text again and again, speaking the words aloud.

The letter was addressed to a young woman Yoshihiro had dated when he was in high school. Her name was Sarah, and she'd come to Japan as a student. Yoshihiro was my older brother—he'd died a year ago. Almost as soon as Sarah went back to Boston, Yoshihiro had begun talking about how he wanted to see what it was like to live in some other country, saying stuff like that, and then one day he just chased off after her, hardly giving a moment's thought to what he was doing. He worked various part-time jobs there and fooled around doing a little of this and a little of that, and didn't come home for almost a year.

Yes . . . as I read the letter I remembered more and more about how things were back then. Yoshihiro had gone off so suddenly and contacted us so infrequently that Sarah had worried about it, and she had sent me a letter explaining how things were going in my brother's life. The letter I'd found was my reply to this. I'd been in high school when I wrote it, and it had never even crossed my mind that things might turn out the way they have. I was writing to a real American Girl—a very kind, very pretty American Girl. I flipped through the dictionary as I wrote, quivering with nervous excitement. Yes . . . Sarah was an adorable girl with intelligent blue eyes. Everything Japanese delighted her, and she was always trailing along behind my brother. She'd call his name. Yo-shi-hi-ro. Yo-shi-hi-ro. And her voice would overflow with an earnest love.

Sarah.

“If you can't do your English homework, get her to help.”

Yoshihiro just tossed open the door to my room and said this: that's how casual an introduction he gave Sarah the first time he brought her to see me. She'd gone to the Summer Festival at a local shrine, and on her way home she'd stopped by our house. I happened to be sitting at my desk at the time, attempting to plow my way through several acres of summer homework, and since this sort of thing didn't happen every day, I had her write my English essay. She seemed so eager to help that I felt it would be unkind to refuse her. Really, I'm not lying. English had always been my best subject.