She grabbed my elbow and was trying to pull me forcibly back in the other direction. Maybe I had upset the delicate balance of the whole, a balance determined by subtleties that I, in my foreignness, would never understand. Or perhaps I had committed an unpardonable act by leaving the group. Again I had the feeling of impenetrable ignorance, which for me will always be synonymous with traveling in Japan. Sorry, I said, but I really have to go now, and with a tug more violent than I’d intended, I freed myself of her hand and jogged toward the exit. But when I turned the corner, there was no sign of Ershadi. The reception area was vacant except for the Japanese women’s shoes lined up on the old wooden shelves. I ran outside and looked around, but the temple grounds were occupied only by large crows, which took clumsily to the sky as I ran past.

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.