What is it that’s so important for you to know? he would say. You know me, all that matters of me. But she wanted to know more. How had he come to be in Japan? Where had he come from? Why? She thought, that’s how it is when you fall in love with someone. Not only the first day, but always. You want to know what it is that makes you love them; if it is only the surface, the dark lashes about his grey eyes, his smile with that reserve in it, that becomes so warm in those moments when the reserve goes, or the feel of his skin, tanned from hot days they spent that summer at the beach in Izu, his body taut as he stretched back on the sand; or if it is more – and she told herself it must be more, mustn’t it, if she and he were anything or to amount to anything – that it must be who he is inside, where he comes from, his story. (Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe there was no more than the moment. Or an accumulation of moments that she or the two of them had strung together, one way or another. The tempura restaurant, Izu, a garden they went to see, the mountains in autumn, so many everyday moments in the city that were different because Jonathan was there and he made her see them differently. Maybe that was what Jonathan, the story of knowing him, taught her. Maybe a man, whoever it is that you love, is no more than what he appears to you to be at some particular moment against some particular surroundings. How he then moves, in those surroundings, at your word or your touch. How he makes you see them, and yourself. Maybe he can be no more to you than that, and your love has no existence in any time but the present. Maybe love is only a passing thing. Unless you choose to make it otherwise. Unless you work on it in the memory, calling it back, making – fixing – the story. Maybe that was why Jonathan took photos, fixing all those moments to carry forward into the future.)

She said to him once, Tell me about your family.

She had known him only a short time but already he had met some of her family, her mother’s parents, in the old house in Kamakura. They had been to Kamakura sightseeing, walking round temples in the rain.

He had a mother and a brother, he said. His father died in a shooting accident when he was seven. (Not the truth, then. Only something close to the truth. He would not tell her the truth until much later, when he was about to go home to England.) They had a farm. His mother had kept the farm for them – at least, for his brother who wanted to farm, if not for him.