We began with the foodstuffs found on the table: “onion, potato, mushroom, bread, salt, sugar.”

Then came the objects within the other rooms of the house: “book, paper, hat, dish, saucer, soap, shoe.”

Next were the phrases of day-to-day life: “Are you hungry? I have your hat. Have you the paper? I have your sugar. No, I have not. Yes, I have it.”

These phrases became less and less useful as the weeks went by: “Have you my old iron gun? No, I have not your old dog. Have you your bad cap? I have the ugly leather shoes.”

I repeated them dutifully because I did not want these lessons to stop, which they did once the new moon that would become Kazuo began to wax within me.

When I asked you why you had not taught me the letters of the English alphabet, you explained that first I must learn how to form the sounds of the language with the tongue and mouth before I could learn how to read and write the language, and grammar would come last of all.

When Kazuo was ready to begin his English-language lessons, your teaching practices had thankfully changed. The house of Koizumi was in Tokyo for about a year by then. You, his proud Papa, were the Chair of English Language and Literature at Tokyo Imperial University. “I am a man with no university degree of my own,” you had said to me, smiling broadly, before the jinrikisha man took you to the campus for your first lecture, when you were reborn yet again, Yakumo.

Kazuo at four was already speaking like a poet, to borrow the words of foster Grandfather, the three languages of this house of Koizumi: English, Japanese, and Herun-san’s. You thought it best that he learn how to read and write English and Japanese at exactly the same time so that one language would not overtake the other or cause undue bias, as he would need both in the years to come. “Kazuo does not look like a Japanese boy,” you reminded me, as if I could ever forget his face. “He will be a tall man, the doctor predicts,” you said, looking at Kazuo’s chubby limbs, imagining them towering over his countrymen one day. “Japanese is his practical language,” you declared, “and English is the language of his soul.” You would waver on this point in the years to come, assigning to Kazuo’s soul a national allegiance that would shift with your own. By the end, you had decided that his soul, like yours, was entirely Japanese.

Either way, you are wrong, Yakumo.

A soul is not limited by language. Language, same as the body, is shed upon our passing. No longer dependent on the vagaries of words—the misplaced, the ill chosen, and the false friends—you are fluent now, Yakumo. I will be as well one day.