His initial response had been to try to make a new start in the city of Kōfu, a few hours’ walk from the grapes and peaches that had been his life’s work, and although he found employment quickly—washing dishes in a rooming house—he knew with immediate certainty that there was nothing for him in the city. On moonlit nights he would sit and stare out at the blanched peak of Mount Fuji, knowing that, despite everything, it was the same mountain he had been staring at since he was a boy working among the trees and vines of his father’s orchard. Even there in Kōfu, sitting in the lantern-lit darkness, it felt as if he could almost reach back into his own past to claim it as his own, but instead there was only the city all around him encased in shadows and the pale eternal shape of the mountain, blue and faintly luminous against the black sky.

His father had been to America once, had worked there when he was a young man, and this was where the idea must have come from. There was nothing for him in Yamanashi Prefecture, not in the countryside and not in the city, and so one afternoon he returned home to the family orchard in the shadow of Fujisan, paid his respects to his father and mother and to his oldest brother and his brother’s pregnant wife and mother-in-law too, and then disappeared across the wide endless Pacific. He had told them he would return once he had earned some money, a kind of nest egg, but in truth he knew he would never see his family again. Sometimes, when the moon shone full upon the orchards of Placer County, he could be found wandering the high hills, staring out toward the west, out across the valley and perhaps, too, across the sea to where Mount Fuji still stands watch over the orchard of his childhood. Maybe such things really happened or maybe they are only part of the narrative I have built for him, for myself. He would never see Fujisan again either.