“Impractical,” I said and gave him the permission to find a place for them anyway. In a sunburned corner of the garden, which you would name “the West Indies,” the gardener planted the musa basjoo, which have yet to bear their fruits, Yakumo.

Within months, I would find you in the West Indies, weeping.

“All gone,” you said. Your words did not seem to believe their own claim.

“What is gone?” I asked, worried that the gardener had taken away one of your beloved plants.

“Saint-Pierre, Sweet Wife. A city of twenty-eight thousand souls.”

“An earthquake? A fire?” I asked.

“A volcano,” you replied, your legs giving way. You knelt on the pebbled path and continued to weep.

“Husband, the boys will hear. They will be frightened, if Papa cries,” I whispered.

The West Indies, you had told me early in the cohabitation, was a grouping of islands on the other side of the world, where you had lived on the island of Martinique, in the city of Saint-Pierre, during the years prior to Japan. You showed me two books that you had written there. You turned their pages slowly, reluctant to leave their words behind. With hand gestures and Dictionary words, you told me that the garden snakes in Matsue were not the same as those in the West Indies, where these creatures, convivial and less aloof, would crawl onto your arm and bathe there with you in the heat of the tropical sun. When you saw the sun, setting ablaze the waters of Lake Shinji and the Ōhashi River, you bemoaned that a sunset in Matsue was not the same as those in the West Indies.

I did not believe you, Yakumo.

I, in truth, stopped listening to you when you engaged in these comparisons, so I do not remember now what had separated the two suns. Why does the New Foreign Teacher travel, if what he longs for is a place where he has already been, I asked myself. Sameness is not possible, I remember thinking. So why seek it? I wondered.