Within weeks, I was introduced to you in your “birdcage,” as you so often called it in jest. In that two-story pavilion tucked into the merchant Orihara’s vast gardens so that he could drink in the views of the river and the lake along with sips of tea, saké, and the light of the moon, you were its curiously plumed tenant.

If that moment could be lived again—if you and I could have another lifetime together that begins tonight—I would introduce myself to you in this way:

I was born in the 4th and final year of Keiō, which was not even a full year.

On the opposite coast, Edo was reborn as Tokyo, and that autumn the 1st year of Meiji began. The eastern capital would soon send more changes, insistent and unrelenting as the sea, across the island of Honshū.

In the 6th year of Meiji, another new calendar arrived, this one from the Far West.

Thus, on the first day of school, I learned that I was born in the year 1868 on the sixth day of February.

I learned that mere weeks after my birth the samurai of Izumo Province flanked the snowy road leading up to Matsue Castle, without their swords and upon their knees. Their surrender to the Emperor’s army was lit by paper lanterns, the teacher stated. It was a detail that stayed with me because the lanterns were not important to the event or to the lesson at hand. That was the impression of an eight-year-old girl. But with the passing of years, I have come to understand why the teacher had lingered on those flickering sources of light.

I have never dared to ask within my own families whether Father or foster Father were among those who had knelt. Was it daytime but the sun’s rays were dampened by cloud cover or was it sundown or a moonless night? No matter the answer, I could see the paper lanterns with their everyday glow. I could see the lights and the long shadows. How fragile those lanterns must have looked in the hands of the battle-worn men. I could see their faces, straight lines, their backs, straighter still. In the days that followed, these men would cut off their topknots and no longer wear their swords in public, as both would be forbidden as remnants of the old way.

I learned that two years after their surrender, the city of Matsue by Imperial edict garrisoned a modern army, whose recruits carried rifles upon their shoulders and marched under the overseeing eyes of a Frenchman on horseback.

I learned that the word “modern” meant improved, from the Far West, and over the seas.

I learned that modern streetlights, with flames fed by coal gas, were installed on the streets between the Ōhashi Bridge and the Tenjin Bridge to encourage the to-and-fro of a modern workday, extended now into the Matsue night.