“A body is a body,” Kazuo, an old soul, replied. “It depends more on the man’s words.”

“Perhaps Papa knew that his readers were not so wise and tended to prefer the ancient over the young.”

“Perhaps,” Kazuo agreed.

I tried my best, Yakumo.

I thought that Kazuo was done with his questions, but he had saved the impossible one for last.

“Am I a half-caste?” your son asked.

If Kiyoshi at seven had asked this of me, I would have answered, “You are half of Papa and half of Mama,” and he would have smiled. Kazuo at fifteen has no taste for such sweet words.

“Yes,” I answered, looking him in the eyes to show him that there was no shame in mine.

“Am I better off dead then?”

“Did someone say this to you? One of your classmates?”

“Papa did.”

“Kazuo!”

“Mama, he did. He wrote it in his book for all to read.”

“Kazuo—”

“Papa wrote that he was in a cemetery in search of the faces of Jizō, and he saw in that city of the dead a half-caste girl with pretty blue eyes. He wrote that she was better off among the dead than the living. He wrote that she was ‘the ghost of another race.’”

“Kazuo—”

“Mama,” Kazuo again interrupted, this time with the finality of a closing gate.

I could not leave him there, Yakumo. In the hopes of bringing him back to us, back to the country inside, I told him the story of his birth:

You came to us, Kazuo, when Papa and Mama were living in Kumamoto City. The household had grown to ten—the house of Inagaki, the maids, a jinrikisha man, a student houseboy—and we were all waiting for you, the eleventh member of the household, to join us. Papa knelt by my side, holding on to Mama’s hands for most of that night. Foster Mother objected to his presence in the room but could not shoo him away.

“Go write, go write,” I told him, and reluctantly he listened.

Before he left, he bent down and said to you, a full moon still within me, in Herun-san’s language, “Come into this world with good eyes!”

In the first hour of the seventeenth day of November, 1893, the 26th year of Meiji, Lafcadio Hearn—as that was still his name back then—became a new man. Your first cries called him from his writing room, and he came running.

“Papa,” I greeted him, as foster Mother lifted the cloth from your old man’s face.

“A boy!” she announced.

“A boy,” I repeated.

Papa cried.

You cried.

I cried.

Foster Mother laughed at the three of us.

Papa could not stop looking into your eyes, Kazuo, which were a startling blue—seas, Papa called them—which later deepened into your curious grays. Papa thought it fitting that you should have two true names.

Leopoldo, he named you.

Kazuo, I named you.

When the sun rose that morning, Papa was still by your side. “A new day!” he regaled you, kissing you on both cheeks.