She had asked him to tell her about his home, many times. She wanted to know so that she could know him better, so that she had some world to fit him into, that he came from, so that he had some dimension deeper than being just an Englishman who had come to Japan, who turned up one day at the language school where she worked, and got a job teaching English because he was English and someone else had left, and that was all the qualification or identity that was needed in Tokyo in the 1970s, Englishness. She did not yet understand what a freedom it was to him to be just that, an Englishman who had come to Japan and had no need of other identity. Sometimes a language teacher, sometimes a photographer, whoever he felt like being, with his leather jacket and his hair (that had been cut too short when he first arrived) left to grow a little long, quietly outside of it all. She would come to think that it was that quality that made him a good photographer; what seemed like the freedom in him, that he could be one person or another, the way that he could hold back but at the same time seem to empathise, both close and distant at once, as if he could look from outside and yet reveal things about a person as if he had seen inside them.