Nishida-san’s absence at the wharf and then the shores of Matsue receding became one moment of loss for me, Yakumo. I could never think of Matsue without thinking of Nishida-san. I could never long for Matsue without longing for Nishida-san. When he passed from this world too soon, Matsue did as well. It was as if that city had only one inhabitant, thirty-four years of age, and when he departed for the unseen world, the city faded from all of memory’s maps. In the years since, I have asked myself, How can one man have carried within him an entire city?

A wife cannot say such words to a husband. A husband cannot hear such words from a wife without demanding, Why am I not the man married with Matsue?

Please believe me, Husband. I did not know that the second telling of your story would unearth Nishida-san’s and mine. Brief and barely begun, it is a story that I have carried within me, written and rewritten many times in the language that he and I share, but there was no place for it to go after Kitzuki, no words to continue it after “Setsu” and “I know.” His was my second heart, Yakumo. Yours was the one that was near.

It is better that you hear this now, Husband. When I join you in the unseen world, the wound of it will have healed.

Before we leave Matsue behind us, Yakumo, this was the ghost story that you had been so sore to miss:

The boatman, as you heard, had said “Ghost!”—and not “Shark!” as I had claimed—but he was not warning you. He was warning the ghost. Same as their fellow villagers, this man and woman of Mitsu-ura saw you, Yakumo, as a body that did not belong there. Same as the villagers on the Hoki coast, their allegiances were not with the foreigner and his rashamen but with the dead among them. In the hands of this man and woman, I had entrusted your life. On their boat, your body and mine had been taken behind the face of a sea cliff so remote that, if we were to scream when the boatman brained us with a rock or a hardwood oar, no one would have heard, and the echoes of our cries, like us, would have died.

I yelled “Shark!” because I needed you to comply, Yakumo. The boatwoman did not want you to sully the sacred waters of the sea caves. Her husband was of the same clear opinion. I needed you to stay with me. I did not want us to perish there. No one would have looked for us until it was too late. The villagers of Mitsu-ura would have claimed that they never saw us depart from their bay. Fearful of being falsely blamed, the jinrikisha man who had taken us there from Matsue would have denied any receipt of the fare.