In the remaining years allotted to us, Yakumo, I was grateful for every one of your letters. They did not come from afar or from over the seas, for which I was also grateful. They were only a night train away in Yaizu, the small fishing village that brought you to the shores of the North Pacific Ocean during the month of August when Tokyo steamed, smelled of rotting refuse, and was renamed “Horrid Tokyo” by you. The “summer house of Koizumi,” as you often called it, was a set of simple rooms in the house of the fisherman Otokichi. There, Papa, half fish, and Kazuo, one-quarter fish, stayed for a month’s worth of daily swims. The summer household grew to include Iwao and even foster Father, before he left for the unseen world. At the tail end of your stay, I arrived with Kiyoshi, once he too joined the house of Koizumi—“We are rich in boys!” you said to me—and, the last August there, I brought Suzuko not even a year old in my arms.

The maids and the student houseboys of the house of Koizumi would come and go with us, in varying combinations, a band of travelers attracting second glances, as the other train passengers attempted to guess our relationships to one another.

In Yaizu, there were no sand-throwing villagers, but there were many who had never seen a cut of beef, a loaf of bread, or a bottle of whiskey. You brought along your own, but you rarely emptied the bottle. “The ocean air, Sweet Wife!” you enthused by way of explanation.

Before your morning meal was when you wrote to me, Yakumo. Your letters were not the multipage affairs that you penned for America and England, the ones that I, and not Yao or any of the other maids, had delivered to the post offices of Matsue, Kumamoto City, Kōbe, and Tokyo in order to assure you that they would begin their long journey with due care. When this task first became a part of my daily routine, I wondered what had happened that week in Herun-san’s life. I looked at those thick envelopes and imagined who had passed away or married or given birth. I could not believe that the matters of your everyday life would require so many pages to document and to relay.

Yakumo, the letters that you wrote to me were less than a page, sometimes as brief as two or three sentences: “Weather is good. Kazuo studies well. No other news.”