8  When Lafcadio Hearn arrived in Japan, the writing system, same as today, consisted of kanji (logographic characters borrowed from the Chinese), two syllabaries (symbols representing syllables), hiragana and katakana, and romaji (a Latin script alphabet). The latter Hearn labeled in his essay “ugly” and “utilitarian.”

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

This novel was a journey—eight years from start to end—that began with a Sea Change Residency (Provincetown, Rhode Island), a generous gift of the Gaea Foundation that gave me not only a room of my own but an entire house for two precious months in March and April of 2010. There, as the Atlantic Ocean crashed and howled, I heard clearly the first line of this novel. Water and wind, I knew, would be the leitmotifs of the story that I wanted to write.

The following year, a Guggenheim Fellowship afforded me travel to the island of Lefkada, Greece, where I took into my lungs the scent of the Ionian Sea and of ginestra in full bloom, two blessings of Lafcadio Hearn’s island of birth that he never experienced as an adult. I thanked him on the slope of Stavrota, the mountain rising from the middle of Lefkada, for taking me there. Hearn said you’re welcome and told me that my journey was far from over. He was right.

Along the way and during the years that followed, I found temporary creative homes, each welcoming in their own invaluable way, at the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities (Bogliasco, Italy); Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (Helsinki, Finland) as a visiting fiction writer; PowderKeg (Brooklyn, New York); Civitella Ranieri Foundation (Umbertide, Italy); Akrai Residency (Palazzolo Acreide, Sicily, Italy); U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship (Tokyo, Japan); Agnes Scott College (Decatur, Georgia) as the Kirk Writer-in-Residence; Baruch College (New York City) as the Harman Writer-in-Residence; Hedgebrook (Whidbey Island, Washington); Accademia Tedesca Villa Massimo (Rome, Italy); and Djerassi Resident Artists Program (Woodside, California). It was at Djerassi, perched in the Santa Cruz mountainside with the Pacific Ocean a blue fringe on the horizon, that I wrote the last line of the novel in May of 2018. This time I thanked not only Hearn but the women whom he had introduced me to: Rosa Antonia Cassimati, Alethea Foley, Koizumi Setsu, and his first biographer, Elizabeth Bisland. They kept his secrets and theirs so close. They divulged so little. They made me work for every word. It has been an honor to be in their company. I miss them already.

I owe the deepest of thanks to the following for helping me to keep the lights on in my own home as I wandered and wrote: the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, Janet Silver, Leslie Shipman, Martin Hielscher at Verlag C.H. Beck, and Paul Slovak at Viking Penguin.