I followed you, Yakumo.

First, I ventured only as far as Kitzuki. To escape the mid-July heat in Matsue, you and Nishida-san had secured rooms at Inaba-ya, a seaside inn facing the Inasa bay. You longed to see the Izumo Shrine again and looked forward to beginning and ending your days with a swim in the Sea of Japan.

“I am half fish,” you declared, as I packed your traveling bag.

“Your people were fishermen?” I asked.

“No, military and medical.”

“Your Mother was a healer?”

“No, my Father was in the army and a doctor. My Mother was a ‘Shiomi Chie.’”

You would later shorten this entry into Herun-san’s language to “Chie” to mean a woman of noble birth, beautiful, and brave. Her tragic end was implied.

That was the course of the conversations back then. As with the paths in the merchant Orihara’s formal gardens, they were rarely in a straight line. You went in one direction, and I went in the other. Somewhere in between, we met.

Mother survived you, Yakumo, by two years.

She died in Ōsaka, the city of those who disappear. In her last month of life, she sent a letter in which she declared that she would leave this world with regrets and that I was one of them.

Her regret, more precisely, was the life that I had with you, which began not in the birdcage in Matsue but in Kitzuki by the sea.

A day after your arrival there, you had asked Nishida-san to write a letter to me. It requested that I travel to the inn as soon as possible. I recognized the head teacher’s handwriting, and for a brief moment I thought the letter was from him. His hand must have trembled, when you began, “One day without you and already it is too long.”

I left for Kitzuki, catching the small steamship that had taken you and Nishida-san along the length of Lake Shinji. Disembarking at the village of Shōbara, I hired a jinrikisha, and I traced your steps. For hours, the long narrow path took me through rice paddies and frog songs. As the sun was poised to set, a torii appeared in the distance, and the jinrikisha man announced that we had reached Kitzuki. At the inn, the maid who answered the front door informed me that the foreigner was still in the sea. The maid was expecting me and without hesitation showed me upstairs to your room, informing me that the adjoining one was also for my use. I wondered what Nishida-san had said to prepare her. I had not asked about his whereabouts, as I had no expectation that he would want to greet me.

Your clothes were in a wrinkled heap, Yakumo. Your money had spilled from its carrying pouch. There were handfuls of seashells gathered on the tenugui that I had given to you as a going-away gift. You had tucked that cotton cloth into your traveling bag without a word about how fitting its seigaiha pattern was for a seaside holiday. I had chosen those blue-and-white waves with some care, Yakumo. A sigh welled up inside of me. He is elsewhere already, I thought.