“The foreigner is harmless,” I heard myself saying to the old woman. “In his yukata and straw hat worn low, none of the returning spirits will even know.”

Her eyes—their lids pried wide open by unseen fingers—informed me that I had overstepped the bounds of honor. To deceive the ancestors on the one night of their return from the unseen world, I could see on her ashen face, was an unforgivable offense.

“Cholera,” I said to you instead. “All large gatherings are forbidden. No Bon-odori this year. A shame,” I added.

Husband, you believed me.

Even when the villagers of Hamamura threw fistfuls of sand at us as we departed, you believed me. Forgive me, Yakumo, but even you were not blind to their bodies, their arms tensing and uncoiling.

What I feared more was their silence. The villagers thought that you would not understand if they jeered or shouted, so they did not waste their words.

We were seen but unseen. We were the returning spirits but with no families there to greet us. We had died among strangers. A curse, Yakumo.

“Gentle and silent” was what you would say to Nishida-san, upon our return to Matsue.

“The villagers on the Hoki coast were gentle and silent?” Nishida-san asked me if those words were true. Friends of his, passing through Hamamura, had heard the villagers tell a very different story.

My face burned with the shame that I had felt in Hamamura and that I could not show there.

Nishida-san quickly apologized for having made such an error in judgment. “I should not have sent Herun-san to the Hoki coast,” he said. “But he takes such pleasure from being the first, as you know,” he explained.

“I know.”

“I should have thought about you, Setsu,” he said. It was the first and only time that Nishida-san would call me by my true name.

Upon hearing “Setsu” released from his lips—an intimacy implied, an affection kindled, a heart so near to mine—I heard my true name for what it had been until then, an afterthought in the lives of men.

“I know,” I repeated with a sharpness in tone that took him by surprise.

You continued to believe, Yakumo.

We would again find ourselves in remote villages where your Western face was the first. At each location, you professed—and I voiced for you—a keen interest in Shintō shrines, Buddhist temples, and the local folklore, superstitions, and beliefs, but the faith that you harbored within you was the one that you wanted most to find. You looked at the bodies around you, and you deemed them gentle. You wanted to see in those bodies something distant and apart from the brutal ones that you had known.

A body is a body, Yakumo, gentle and brutal. Nothing, in truth, separated yours from theirs.