A historical novelist is always time traveling, and her best and truest companions are historians and research librarians. The following have gone above and beyond: Thomas Boardman, the library director of Temple University–Japan Campus; at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County’s Information and Reference Department: Tom Moosbrugger (reference librarian), Alex Temple (senior library services assistant), Keith Good (senior library services assistant), and Stephen Headley (reference librarian), who found the date of death for Alethea Foley, an important fact that I had not seen in any of the secondary sources that I had consulted; and Yoji Hasegawa, a historian, an author, and a literary translator, whose book A Walk in Kumamoto: The Life and Times of Setsu Koizumi—Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Wife (Global Oriental, 1997), introduced me to a fully documented woman. Within the pages of Hasegawa’s book there was another invaluable gift, his English translation of Koizumi Setsu’s 1918 memoir, Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn.

The following dear friends read the various first drafts of this novel, and they deserve not only recognition but a medal because they waded through a morass of typos, misplaced modifiers, and grammatical errors that only an English-as-a-second-language writer could make, not to mention the camouflaged plot lines, character underdevelopments, and a narrative chronology that refused linearity at every turn: Barbara Tran, David L. Eng, Jeff Kingston, Kyoko Yoshida, Alan Brown, Lizzie Skurnick, Shelley Salamensky, and Jeffrey Angles.

Thanks also to illustrator extraordinaire Yuko Shimizu for seeing between the lines of this novel a bird’s nest adrift on the sea and bringing that arresting image to the cover design, and to photographer Haruka Sakaguchi, who presented me with a photograph that made me feel truly seen.

I save the very last lines for Damijan Saccio, because without him there would not be a first line. We have been each other’s companions at home and abroad for twenty-nine years. Long ago I gave him a postcard of Elliott Erwitt’s 1963 black-and-white photograph of three women waiting next to a “Lost Persons Area” sign, and I wrote on the back of the postcard that without him I would be there. I meant it. I still do.

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