I did not run nor did I cry. The Westerner knelt in front of me—“his beard a small furry animal on his face,” I often said at this point in the story, which always made the children laugh out loud and you too, Yakumo. The Westerner asked for my age. He unfurled his fingers, first one then two. I mimicked him. His beard moved, lifting slightly upward, and his eyes shone, and I took that to mean that he was pleased. He reached into a pocket of his uniform—I remember him wearing an overcoat with many polished buttons—and he took out a small object with a thin reed-like handle, which was no longer small once he had placed it in the recipient’s hands. He then led his horse away from the crying children whose distress had been greatly increased by the recognition that I alone had received a gift. What it was none of us knew, but the gift was gilded in parts and clear in others, and the whole of it caught the early afternoon Matsue light.

I showed the object to foster Father, and he showed me how to hold the small oval of glass by its handle. He hovered the glass over an ant crawling toward a clump of flowering thistle, and I looked down to find that the ant had grown greatly in size. Foster Father warned me never to hold the glass over an insect for too long, especially when the sun was bright and high in the sky, as the small creature would die. I did not want the gift after hearing of its power to kill, and I gave it to foster Father. He said that the gift was mine alone to keep. You were brave to stand your ground, he declared.

Years later, when I was in school, I learned that the man was named Frédéric Valette from the country of France, and he was one of the first Westerners to come to Matsue in 1870, the 3rd year of Meiji.

Yakumo, remember how Kazuo would ask—and then Iwao and Kiyoshi would as well—to see the Frenchman’s glass? I instead would show them the one that you kept on your desk and tell them that Papa’s magnifier was many times stronger than that little old thing that Mama has kept with her all these years. I liked very much how the boys would look at your glass and then back up at you, Yakumo. Their Papa was, in their eyes, the stronger of the two.

Kazuo told me how your “lady of Matsue” recounted my story on the pages of your book, and how her details were not the same as mine: a daimyō, not an Imperial edict, had brought the Frenchman to Matsue; Mother, not foster Father, was with her that day; the insect magnified was a fly, not an ant. Kazuo, like his Papa, reveled in the minute. He was thorough in his assessment and cataloging of the discrepancies between her story and mine.