They had come to meet us. Selma opened a second umbrella. The optician said, “Konnichiwa,” and bowed deeply. Frederik bowed, too.

Frederik and Selma looked at each other for a very long time as they shook hands. “You don’t look like Japan at all,” Selma said. “More like Hollywood.”

The optician and I thought of the several lives one has in Buddhism, because from the way Selma and Frederik looked at each other, they seemed to know each other from at least one previous life, and not just casually, but as if they had saved the world together or grown up in the same family.

“You also don’t look the way I’d pictured you,” Frederik said. “You look like someone on television, but the name escapes me.”

And that was the moment we finally also saw the resemblance. My God, he’s right, the optician and I thought, and we couldn’t understand how it had never occurred to us before.

Selma frowned, because the optician and I were staring at her as if seeing her for the first time. “Come inside, quickly,” she said, and we went into the house.

“Careful, don’t step there.” From the foyer, the optician gestured toward the area in the kitchen circled with red tape. “The floor is too weak. I marked the area.”

Frederik looked at the red outline from the hallway.

“It’s been dangerous for a while now,” the optician said. “I know it’s no state to be in.”

Frederik smiled and said, “Apparently it is,” and took off his shoes. So we all did the same.

Selma went to get him towels and a bathrobe, then we all went into the kitchen. I tried to see it for the first time as Frederik would. The yellow wallpaper; the light blue credenza with gray pleated curtains in the glass doors; the corner bench; the old, scratched wooden table; and the gray linoleum floor with the round, red-outlined area near the window—Martin had once said that on the gray floor, that area looked like the eye of a whale, an eye completely encircled by an eyelid inflammation—and the water heater over the sink, still plastered with Martin’s and my collection of Hanuta candy stickers: a grinning apple with a bite out of it that said, “Today, I had a bite”; an energetic walnut shouting, “Let’s get cracking!” I tried to see with fresh eyes the macramé owl hanging on the wall, which the shopkeeper’s wife had given Selma as a gift, and the white linen curtains that hung down precisely to the windowsill.

But I wasn’t able. It was like trying to lose something on purpose.