No, Husband, the whiskey would be for me.

Yakumo, during the first and the second tellings of your story, I have found that Kumamoto City and Kōbe have no distinct borders in my memory. Both cities you despised. You accused them of losing themselves to the West. You saw their redbrick buildings as affronts. You disliked the telegraph poles that marred their views. Even the steamboats and the trains that sped us from city to city you found fault in. Too loud, you complained. Too fast, you decried. Your students were dull and sullen. Your fellow teachers preferred beer and cigars to sake and pipes or, worse, were Japanese Christians. You were insulted by the Japanese women in their Western-style dresses and hats. Those horrid heeled boots are ruining their feet, you railed. You cringed when you heard them speaking the English language. You abhorred the modern Japanese, Yakumo, though you were there to educate their sons. You retreated to your Father’s language, writing until you fell asleep atop the pages that became your articles and your books.

Yakumo, I could travel with you to Kumamoto City, Kōbe, and soon to Tokyo, but I could not accompany you when you were in misery. It was not language that separated us there, but I did believe that language—the English one—could bring you back when you had been away for too long.

Before Kazuo came to us, I had pleaded with you to teach me. “English is ugly,” you said, “coming from the mouth of a Japanese.” You meant the mouth of a Japanese woman, Husband.

Silence was available to us both, Yakumo. At first, you also did not recognize mine as anger. When you did not hear “Pardon me for being the first to sleep” for the first time since the cohabitation, you must have known something was awry. You dismissed it though, as an oversight, an uncharacteristic moment of carelessness that had kept this back turned to yours. Four nights of that back broke yours, Husband. You woke me on the fifth and said, “Sweet Wife, we begin tomorrow.”

“Begin what?” I asked, rubbing the eyelids open.

“Begin English,” you answered. “Sweet Wife cannot be ugly,” you apologized.

I kissed the tops of your hands that night, which made you laugh low, a wiser man of forty-two.

In the months that followed, we sat across from each other for an hour every evening as you said English words aloud to me, repeating them, as I slowly wrote them in my notebook, choosing the katakana and hiragana characters that most closely mimicked their sounds. It was a list of nonsense words to any other Japanese eyes but mine. Setsu’s language, you called it. After each entry, I added its meaning in Japanese to remind me what these sounds meant. Before the lesson ended, I would read these “English words” back to you.