I will not ask for forgiveness, Yakumo, for these untruths. If I were given a second life with you, I would say and behave the same. There are fewer ways to save a life than you would think. There are even fewer ways to live a life, given the circumstances that we cannot change.

You have told untruths about me, Yakumo. They sting us like nettles, I know.

Kazuo at fifteen is reading your Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. He tells me that he is practicing his English, but I believe that he is reading your first book about the country outside because he is missing you. He recognizes the stories of ghosts and other wandering spirits as the ones that foster Grandmother had told to keep him tucked in for the night. He identifies others as the oft-repeated family stories of Papa and Mama’s travels in Izumo Province and the surrounds. Kazuo has finished the first volume and is now reaching the end of the second. He has asked me questions, Yakumo, and there is one that I cannot answer.

“Papa wrote about you, Mama,” Kazuo began.

“Did he?”

“No,” he answered. “I misspoke. He only wrote about your true name. He explained to his readers that there are two kanji, both pronounced ‘setsu,’ one meaning the node of the bamboo and the other ‘virtue, fidelity, and constancy.’”

“Which one did Papa say I was?”

“He did not.”

“I see.”

“The passage was actually about the bamboo, and why the people of Matsue display it during the New Year Matsuri.”

“I see.”

Yakumo, as I grow older, this face reveals more of this heart. Kazuo must have caught a glimpse of both because he offered that “a lady of Matsue” in volume two was certainly a reference to Mama. The story that she told to Papa, Kazuo said, reminded him of one that I had often told him and his siblings about my youth:

I was two—but, perhaps, that is far too young to have a memory, so the memory may be a story that was told to me—and I had been taken to the open fields near Matsue Castle to see the modern army marching and performing precision drills, dressed in their new trim uniforms, their rifles gleaming. Their commander was a Westerner who rode on a horse, chestnut brown. This man’s face was the color of a freshly caught tai fish. He wore a full beard, which made his ruddy face appear small and half the size of a Japanese man’s. I remember him descending from his horse and leading this animal over to where we children had gathered. Some immediately ran off, and the ones who stayed began to cry.