I’d been bewitched by Fuji that night, transformed into a simpleton, a mooncalf, completely without a will of my own. Even now, recalling it all leaves me feeling peculiarly weary and languid.

I stayed in Yoshida just one night. When I got back to Misaka Pass, the woman who ran the place was all knowing smiles, and her fifteen-year-old sister was standoffish. I found myself wanting to assure them I’d been up to nothing naughty, and, though they asked me no questions, I related in detail my experiences of the previous day. I told them everything—the name of the inn I’d stayed at, how Yoshida’s sake tasted, how Fuji looked in the moonlight, how I’d dropped my purse. The little sister seemed appeased.

“Get up and look, sir!” One morning not long afterwards, this same girl stood outside the teahouse shouting up to me in a shrill voice, and I grudgingly got up and stepped out into the corridor.

Her cheeks were flushed with excitement. She said nothing, only pointed toward the sky. I looked, and—ah!—snow. Snow had fallen on Fuji. The summit was a pure and radiant white. Not even the Fuji from Misaka Pass is to be scoffed at, I thought.

“Looks good,” I said.

“Isn’t it superb?” she said, triumphantly selecting a better word. She squatted down on her heels and said, “Do you still think Misaka’s Fuji is hopeless?”

I’d often lectured the girl to the effect that this Fuji was hopelessly vulgar, and perhaps she’d taken it more to heart than I’d realized.

“Let’s face it,” I said, amending my teaching with a grave countenance. “Fuji is just no good without snow.”

In my dotera I walked about the mountainside filling both my hands with evening primrose seeds, which I brought back to the teahouse and scattered in the back yard.

“Now, listen,” I said to the girl, “these are my evening primroses, and I’m coming back next year to see them, so I don’t want you throwing out your laundry water and whatnot here.” She nodded.

I’d chosen this particular flower because a certain incident had convinced me that Fuji goes well with evening primroses. The teahouse at Misaka Pass is what one might call remote, so much so that mail isn’t even delivered there. Thirty minutes’ bouncing and swaying on a bus brings you to the foot of the pass and Kawaguchi, a poor little village if ever there was one, on the shore of the lake; it was at the post office here that my mail was held for me, and once every three days or so I had to make the journey to pick it up. I tried to choose days when the weather was good. The girl conductors on the buses don’t offer the sightseers aboard much in the way of information about the scenery. But once in a while, almost as an afterthought, in listless near-mumble, one of them will come out with something dreadfully prosaic like: “That’s Mitsu Pass; over there is Lake Kawaguchi; freshwater smelt inhabit the lake.”