Yet for this Ōkubo house, I had instructed the builders that the new and old wings needed to look exactly the same. The halves needed to appear as if they were part of a whole, I told them. The builders questioned why the rashamen did not want an entirely new Western-style house for her foreigner. They never dared to ask this in front of me because I, as far as their wages were concerned, was the master of this Ōkubo house. They nodded their heads and complied when I specified that the eaves of both wings, should be wide and generous. As deep as the eaves of the houses in the shadows of Matsue Castle, I could have said but did not because none of these men had been to isolated Izumo Province. Many of the details that I wanted for this Ōkubo house were taken from those rented in Matsue, Kumamoto City, and Kōbe or from the long list of inns where we had once stayed. This desire—not for sameness but for a reminder of where we had been—was triggered by travel or, rather, from having traveled. I regretted that Setsu at twenty-two had no understanding and little compassion for the New Foreign Teacher, who at forty had already circumnavigated the globe, his heart an atlas of such longings.

To your West Indies, the gardener later added at your behest a grouping of rare agave plants that you brought back from Yaizu, their long silver-gray leaves—the boys called them “swords”—looking as if they were covered in a fine layer of dust. The agaves, I knew, were your memorial to the lost city, Yakumo. The destruction of Saint-Pierre—I could not have known—was a harbinger of the losses that were to come.

In the months that followed, you were often elsewhere but not in the usual manner. You awoke early and wrote letters, more than you had in recent years. At the morning meal, you regaled Kazuo, eight years of age, about your years at boarding schools, years that you despised, you had told me. Young boys are animals, you had said, pointing at your storm-cloud eye. If Kazuo failed to show interest, you scolded him for his “mosquito” voice. If he listened intently, you slapped him on the back and encouraged him to have seconds of his toasts and soft eggs so that he would grow even taller. If you noticed that Iwao, Kiyoshi, and I were listening to your every word, you switched from Herun-san’s language to English. At midday, you whistled in the West Indies. In the late afternoon, you skipped with the boys along the eaves of this Ōkubo house. The hours of sleep you found unnecessary and wrote even longer into the Tokyo night.

You were in this elsewhere, Yakumo, because you had given your last lecture at Tokyo Imperial University.