No, Yakumo, I did not come to this thought in a book or in an old tale. It is my own, Husband.

Kazuo’s daily English-language lessons were in the early mornings before your university classes, which meant that your first pupil of the day was often groggy with sleep and whimpered whenever you lost patience with him. “Lucky boy,” I would remind him after you had left. “Papa is a Tokyo Imperial University professor. Only the brightest young men in the country can study with Papa,” I told Kazuo.

I needed those lessons to continue, Yakumo, for Kazuo and for me.

Listening at the edge of the room divider, I was teaching myself the alphabet and its sounds. Studying their oversized letters that you wrote on the sheets of old newspapers for Kazuo’s benefit, I would teach myself to identify their shapes—“A,” the gable roof of a Shintō shrine; “B,” a double-lobed gourd; “C,” a comb ornament for the hair—but these letters to my great regret would never join hands and dance for me the way that they would for Kazuo.

Iwao had already joined the house of Koizumi by then but with less fanfare than his elder brother, as the month following Iwao’s arrival, the household had been deep in mourning.

Nishida-san at thirty-four had left this world. You were forty-seven, and I was twenty-nine. You wept and berated the gods for being so cruel. You tried to reverse Nishida-san’s fate and yours. You pledged aloud to the gods that they could take everything from you, if Nishida-san could live again.

Everything, Yakumo? Even Kazuo and Iwao? I wanted to scream into the Tokyo night.

So this is love, I thought.

I too had felt the loss, Husband. Nishida-san’s hand had written the only letter that I had ever received from you. It was a letter of love. Should distance separate the two of us, we were on our own now, no bridge to connect the shores.

I have given thanks and offerings to the gods that they did not hear you, Yakumo, or if they did, they rejected outright your foolish, selfish, sentimental plea.

You resolved to honor Nishida-san by becoming a letter writer yourself. “I want to write a letter to you, Sweet Wife,” you told me.

“Are you going somewhere?” I asked in jest.

Your reply was a half smile that said “yes” and “no.”

You began to sit beside Kazuo when I tutored him in Japanese, determined to learn the fundamentals of hiragana and katakana, which Papa and son both acquired in admirable time. But when Kazuo learned kanji—the first of the thousands of characters with their multiple strokes, each stroke with their prescribed, exact order upon the page—you found them a thick, impenetrable tangle of vines. I assured you that what you had learned was enough, that we would not hunger.