Too Western, I can hear you objecting. Too bare on the tongue, as you would say. You prefer that I call you “Husband” or “Papa,” not “Yakumo,” your Japanese true name that took the place of “Lafcadio.”

But Koizumi Yakumo, you are Western, and I, Koizumi Setsu, am Japanese. The children are the sweetest fruits of a grafted tree.

I know you are aware of the occurrences, minor and momentous, that take place underneath the eaves of this house, more so now as your work here is done. It is a great comfort to me all the same to share the household matters with you. I hope that it gives you solace as well.

Tonight, I stand before you, not to confess—because one cannot confess to something that is known—but to ask that you understand why I have been remiss of late. The reason for my nighttime absences, Yakumo, is a story. The story is about Lafcadio Hearn and how he became Koizumi Yakumo. You already know of its first telling, incomplete and rushed, that I sent to your Elizabeth for the pages of her book.

Tonight, these pages that I share with you are the second telling of that story. Their facts you will recognize but, perhaps, not their stings. Before I lock them away, you should know what they have revealed.

Rest assured, Yakumo, there will be a third telling, redacted and final, to take their place. That story will go into the world where it will stand sentry, as I do now, to your memory.

I have missed—What was the French that you used to say? Was it tête-à-tête?—yes, I have missed the ritual of our nightly tête-à-tête, Yakumo.

Once the children are asleep, I light the lamp in your writing room and we begin. These lips do not move, nor do yours. We hear each other’s voices all the same. The language that we use—understood nowhere else but within this house of Koizumi—was devised in Matsue, during a winter so cold that it was said that Matsue Castle itself shivered underneath its heavy cloaks of snow.

The frigid winds had blown in from the Sea of Japan, entered the Nakaumi Lagoon, and met there the Ōhashi River and the wide expanse of Lake Shinji, leaving in their wake sheets of ice, glistening pieces of paper floated by the gods. On the first day of the first month of the 24th year of Meiji, I had looked out at the city of my birth, more water than land, and I saw what the poets of long ago had called “a silver world.” On that same day of the first month of 1891, you had looked out at the same city, and you saw a new world, which you insisted was still an old one. How unchanged could Matsue have been, if you were already among us, Yakumo?