Love: I can only call it that, however different it was from every other instance of love I had experienced. What I knew of love had always stemmed from desire, from the wish to be altered or thrown off course by an uncontrollable force. But in my love for Ershadi I nearly didn’t exist beyond that great feeling. To call it compassion makes it sound like a form of divine love, but it wasn’t that, it was terribly human. If anything, it was an animal love, an animal that has been living in an incomprehensible world until one day it encounters another of its kind and understands that it has been applying its comprehension in the wrong place all along.

It sounds far-fetched, but at that moment I had the feeling that I could save Ershadi. Still running, I passed under the monumental wooden gate, and my footfalls echoed up in the rafters. A sense of fear began to seep in, the fear that he planned to take his life just like the character he’d barely played, and that I had lost the brief chance I’d been given to intercede. When I reached the street, it was deserted. I turned in the direction of the famous pathway alongside the narrow river and ran, my bag slapping against my thigh. What would I have said if I had caught up to him? What would I have asked him about devotion? What was it I wanted to be when he turned, and at last his gaze fell upon me? It didn’t matter, because when I came around the bend the path was empty, the trees black and bare. Back at the ryokan, hunched on the tatami floor, I searched online, but there was no news about Homayoun Ershadi, nothing to suggest that he was traveling in Japan, or no longer alive.

My doubt only grew on the flight back to Tel Aviv. The plane glided above a great shelf of cloud, and the farther it got from Japan, the less possible it seemed that it had actually been Ershadi, until at last it seemed absurd, just as kimonos and Japanese toilets and etiquette and tea ceremonies, which had all possessed irrevocable genius in Kyoto, at a distance grew absurd.

The night after I got back to Tel Aviv, I met Romi at a bar. I told her about what had happened in Japan, but in a laughing way: laughing at myself for believing for even a moment that it was actually Ershadi I’d seen and run after. As I told the story, her large eyes became larger. With all of the drama of the actress that she is, Romi lifted a hand to her heart and called the waiter to refill her glass, touching his shoulder in the instinctive way she has of drawing others into her world, under the spell of her intensity. Eyes locked with mine, she removed her cigarettes from her bag, lit one, and inhaled. She reached across the table and laid her hand over my hand. Then she tilted her chin and blew out the smoke, all without breaking her gaze.