In early January, 1891, the 24th year of Meiji, Lafcadio Hearn and Koizumi Setsu married in Matsue. Tsune had no role to play in the introduction and was made to disappear. Nishida Sentarō gallantly stepped in. I raised the house of Nishida from foot-soldier class to samurai, and I bestowed upon the head teacher a familial connection to the house of Shiomi, which facilitated the plausibility of his performance as a trusted go-between. The early days of silence within the birdcage and the Dictionary, our unsteady bridge, I mentioned only in passing. Instead, there was always Nishida-san, a friend to us both, to serve as interpreter. He was present for you, Yakumo, so this characterization was only half untrue.

Elizabeth Bisland was no San’in Shimbun, and for this I was grateful. She had asked for my age at the time of the marriage, but she sought no explanation as to why I had been without a husband at the age of twenty-two. Thus, the first marriage was allowed to disappear entirely—it went to Ōsaka, as it were—from that first telling and then from the pages of your Elizabeth’s book. The San’in Shimbun would have asked more questions, Yakumo. They would have been wary of a fish with no bones.

Elizabeth is American, I reminded myself, as I wrapped those pages—your story, translated, was already unrecognizable to me, Yakumo—for their journey overseas, backed by a thin piece of wood to keep them neat and crisp upon their arrival, as you had so often done.

Yakumo, I know you are smiling. Sweet Wife! is what you are thinking. Is “sweet” the same as “simple” in Herun-san’s language, Yakumo?

I know more about your Elizabeth now. The San’in Shimbun would have been honored to have her, a journalist of renown in the city of New York before she became Mrs. Wetmore. Like you, Elizabeth was a well-documented traveler.

Kazuo, curious in recent years about his Father’s biographer, has read the book that Elizabeth Bisland wrote about her famed race around the world. He told me that she was twenty-eight years old at the time. Unmarried, I presumed. Though she lost the race—Is travel often a competition for Americans, Yakumo?—to another reporter named Nellie Bly, your Elizabeth beat you to these shores. Upon arriving in Yokohama in December of 1889, the 22nd year of Meiji, Elizabeth Bisland met there Paymaster Mitchell McDonald, U.S.N., who became her American friend in Yokohama before he was yours, Yakumo.

How small this world is. How like a grain of sand you can become when the stories of that small world are kept from you. When they are eventually told, they are waves, Yakumo, sweeping your legs from under you.

Mr. McDonald gifts the house of Koizumi a considerable sum of money every Christmas, Yakumo.

Last year, it meant the difference between taking in boarders and not. The thought of dividing up this house keeps these eyes from closing at night. Mr. McDonald has a family of his own to care for, and I ask myself—and now I ask it of you—whether these gifts are, in truth, from Mrs. Wetmore, a woman of means now?