“A new kind of sickness,” you told Dr. Kizawa in Herun-san’s language, which I repeated to him in Japanese. You were still seated at your high desk, attempting to write a letter, when he arrived. “Sickness of the heart,” you diagnosed, without looking up at the doctor’s face. Dr. Kizawa enjoyed your company, in health and in sickness, Yakumo, and did not take offense. He asked about your Waseda students and suggested that they were the source of your discomfort. I repeated his joke to you, and you smiled and raised your eye to greet his. He asked you to lie down on the tatami, and he listened to your heart. He listened for a long while. I had the urge to push him aside and listen to it too. Dr. Kizawa looked up at me and said that the cherry tree, outside your writing room, was in full bloom. You heard “sakura” and understood the subject of his remarks. You and I looked out of the windows. We had not even noticed them, Yakumo.

“Snowing,” you said.

“Snowing,” I repeated.

Dr. Kizawa left instructions for you to rest, eat a light meal of broth and soft tofu, and to halt your teaching for a month or two. To me, he said to send for him immediately once the pain returns.

“Returns?” I asked, as I walked with him to the front door.

“Yes,” he replied, his face showing me what he had hidden from you.

Death is the ending to all of our stories, Yakumo, and yet its arrival can still manage to surprise and unsettle, like a child’s cry in the forest.

Seven days later, on the twenty-sixth day of September, 1904, the 37th year of Meiji, you awoke at six thirty in the morning, earlier than usual, to birdsongs rising from the bamboo grove. I helped you dress in your yukata and tabi, and you took your morning meal in the writing room. As you sipped your bowl of broth, you told me that last night you had dreamed of a faraway place. It was not a country where you had been before, but it was familiar to you all the same. There were blackbirds there, the sky dotted with them, as if they were gathering. Perhaps you had followed them to that place or they had followed you. You were on a mountainside, green with low trees, the underside of their leaves flickering silver, flowers wild with the color of morning light, nearby an unseen sea. You said that the breezes there carried with them the scent of butter, thyme, and honey. You closed your eye and took in a deep breath, as if these scents were here in Ōkubo.

I breathed in as well. I smelled only bread toasting.