According to the San’in Shimbun, at the tail end of August you began your four-day journey westward via train, jinrikisha, and then on foot once the mountain paths narrowed. Your traveling companion to Matsue was a graduate from the illustrious Imperial University in Tokyo, a young man identified as Manabe Akira, whose English-language skills, it was reported, rivaled Matsue’s own Nishida Sentarō’s. You arrived in the city on August 30, and you began teaching on September 2. The city and I read that your teaching days were five hours long and that you taught twenty-four hours per week. One newspaper even reported that your salary was second only to the prefectural Governor’s. We were assured that your fellow teachers and students thought very highly of you. “Lafcadio Hearn is too good a man to be in so isolated a place,” I remember reading. I had not thought of my hometown as an “isolated place” before you, Yakumo. At school, I had learned that we were a city of forty thousand, a number equal to the fish in the whole of the Sea of Japan, I had imagined.

The San’in Shimbun reported that the prefectural Governor honored you with invitations to view the horse races, the competitions of weaponry, the sumo tournaments, the Noh performances, and many of the formal gatherings at the Governor’s official residence. Nishida Sentarō was identified as your interpreter and your peer at these events, though illness had prevented the head teacher from being present on several recent occasions, it was noted.

Some in Matsue were more impressed by the accounts of your visit to the Izumo Shrine in Kitzuki. The ancient pine trees of Kitzuki must have shuddered in unison at the sight of the unfamiliar race, it was written. You were the first Westerner, according to the papers, to be granted admittance into the sanctuary of this Shintō shrine. Nishida Sentarō was credited with writing the letter of introduction to the shrine’s high priest, which had gained you access. It was Manabe Akira who had accompanied you there because the head teacher was once again too ill to travel.

The women and girls on my lane fussed over that detail when I read the article aloud to them. “Herun-san” and “Nishida-san,” the newspapers had dubbed the two of you, forgoing the honorific “sensei,” which otherwise would have followed the names of teachers, to suggest the modern nature of the friendship, perhaps. Foster Mother, in particular, was concerned about the frequent mentions of illness in connection with the head teacher. “Twenty-seven is young,” she said, as she threaded the eye of a needle. Foster Mother meant that men, unlike women, do not age at the same headlong pace, and that I at twenty-two was fast approaching the end of youth.