In Kitzuki at the shores of Inasa bay, Setsu at twenty-three heard, for the first time, the language of her birth offering the words of a man in love with her. When Nishida-san interpreted for you, it was his voice that I heard and his language that I understood.

Maeda Tameji had spoken to Setsu at nineteen of hunger and other bodily needs. He forgot those words along with “family” and “honor” when he abandoned her and his other burdens for the city of Ōsaka. At night when sleep was absent, Setsu then counted the years still before her. White hair and silence were what she thought they would bring by way of companionship. In the dark, she resolved to accept that this body would never carry within it a second beating heart. Without husband and without children, a woman’s life was as quiet as a snowfall, she had been told. In the dark, she knew that the snow had begun. She lay there and knew that the snow would cover her in the end.

When Setsu at twenty-two found herself in your birdcage and she understood there only the bush warbler’s song, she thought of it as the opposite of silence. She did not think of it as the start of a new life though. She thought of it as what came after the end of one.

Yakumo, with Nishida-san by your side, you were no longer a drunken poet, though sake had flowed freely into cup after cup. In Kitzuki, you were a poet whose recited words made the evening sky a swirl of starlight and the moon a flutter of wings.

That night you and Nishida-san had argued briefly about a writer, a Frenchman whose books you admired and he did not. I asked what he had written, and you gave me a long explanation that Nishida-san then condensed into “a novel about a French naval officer and a Japanese woman named Chrysanthemum.”

You were taken aback, Yakumo. You took your friend’s refusal to interpret every word of what you had said as a betrayal. I could see it on your face, first as a small collapse of your brow and then as a twitch at the corner of your right eye. In later years, the person seated before you would have been shown to the door, followed by instructions to me to never allow them back inside of the garden gate.

You and Nishida-san stared at each other, daring the other to speak first, while the waves crashing outside took over the conversation. You both wore your hair longer during those summer days, the ends grazing the shoulders, the thick locks swept to one side and tucked behind an ear so they would not curtain the forehead and the lashes. In that moment when you were both bound in place by pride, Nishida-san’s hair fell over his eyes and then yours followed. Out of habit, I reached over and tucked back your hair. Then I did the same for Nishida-san. When the hand returned to the lap, I realized what it had done. A sharp intake of air replaced the sounds of the sea.