It seemed OK there, in Tokyo, that he was doing that.

And besides, you touch me, she said. You touch me lots.

He laughed then, as if she was right and he was silly to have had that idea.

OK, he said, maybe you’re right, but I still have to go home, for a while at least, and you can come too, and then we’ll go from there.

The walk took them on along a ridge and through bare stretches of land. They had to watch the ground carefully for the path. It was only a thin beaten track that had been made by the people who had walked it before. No one but the two of them up there that day but she was aware of all the others, walking that path looking for the cairns, or some of them building the cairns, picking up stones to mark where they had been so that other people could see and follow. If it hadn’t been for the cairns they might have got lost, up there on the top of the mountain. She went behind him in the mist, his dull green coat that blended with the rocks. She had come all that way to be with him but he receded before her, camouflaged in his green coat, closed into his thoughts. She ran to catch up with him.

Wait for me, she said. I don’t want to lose you up here.

There was a time in Tokyo when he showed her his photos from the war. They were horrible pictures that she didn’t like to see and liked less to remember, but all the same she could not pull herself away from them. He gave her a magnifying glass and let her see all of them, the contact prints, the pictures that were not published as well as the ones that were, standing behind her, watching her look, as if each of the pictures was a confession that he had to have her see, showing her things that she did not want to see, that he did not want ever to have seen himself, as if he thought that she would not want to see him if he had seen those things. That’s who I am, he said. A spectator. A taker of pictures. He said that he had felt cold, taking those photos, even when he had been sweating with fear. And it was cold of him, to show them to her. I did not mean to be cold, he said. It’s something in me.

No, she said. It’s only the camera. You put the camera in front of your eyes.