Harlan and Julie were walking home from Hankyu Itami Station. It had been a busy day at the conversation school and they were both tired. The night was cold, the sky clear. There were few people on the streets. Julie was not her usual self. She seemed distant tonight, somber. She stopped suddenly and looked Harlan in the eyes.

"Harlan, tell me honestly what you think of Yoshiko."

"I don't know. She's become a good friend. She's well-read and speaks English very well. I like the conversations we have about books. She seems a bit pensive at times, as if she's pondering some great existential question. I suppose she doesn't fit the typical Japanese stereotype. I like her aloofness, her questioning mind. I think she's much more mature than most 22-year-olds."

"I don't mean that. I mean what do you really think about her? Do you have any strong feelings for her? Do you think you love her? I know you've been sleeping with her."

Harlan paused for a moment. This was an unexpected line of questioning. He was more accustomed to Julie acting like a veteran of Japan teaching a new recruit the ropes when they walked the streets to the station and home together, rode the train, and taught the classes. She was always pointing out landmarks to remember so he would not get lost, interesting shops, ways to save money, how to use the train system, personality traits of the evening students that could be used in conversation when the lessons became slow and there was a lull. She was always remarking how polite the Japanese were, how she loved the way they bowed to one another, how she loved the children's smiles. She had never tried to probe his inner feelings.

"That's a difficult question," he said. "I know I like her a lot. Love? I have a hard time with the word 'love.' I think that takes a long time to develop."

"She's a very sensitive woman, you know."

"Yes, I get that feeling."

"I just don't want to see her hurt. She's tried to commit suicide before."

"I've noticed the scars on her wrists."

"Did you ask her about them?"

"No. I figure that's her business. If she wants to tell me, she probably will. Why are you bringing all this up now?"

"Because I've decided to return to Canada and go back to school to get a nursing degree. My visa extension is up soon and I can't get another visa unless I find a company to sponsor me. I've been looking around and haven't been able to find anything."

"Does Yoshiko know what you've decided?"

"We've talked about it, but I didn't make up my mind until today. When I get home, I'll tell her. That's why I wanted to know what you felt about her. I think after I'm gone she'll be lonely and vulnerable. She needs someone to talk to and to care for her. Please be careful with her, Harlan. Please don't take advantage of her. She really likes you a lot, maybe she's even falling in love with you. Will you promise me you won't hurt her?"

"I promise."

They arrived at Yoshiko's apartment.

"You go ahead," Harlan said. "It's a bit late and I want to take a bath. I know what you have to say to each other is private. I'll grab something to eat later."

"Are you sure? Yoshiko's probably made dinner for both of us."

"No, that's OK. I'll see you later."

Harlan went home, got his towel and some fresh underwear, then headed toward the sento public bath. He had been self-conscious the first time he went there a month before, but now he was a regular customer and the master and other customers treated him kindly.

He took off his shoes at the entrance, entered the locker room, greeted and paid the master. He stripped, put his clothes in a locker, and entered the steam-filled bathing room. In the middle of the room was a long trough of water. Along the walls were taps where several bathers were soaping and rinsing themselves. At the far end was a large tub in which more bathers were soaking contentedly. A forested mountain overlooking a calm lake was painted on the tiled wall behind the tub. Harlan squatted on a miniature stool next to the trough, rinsed himself with a plastic bucket, soaped, scrubbed, rinsed again, then immersed himself in the large tub. He had come to love this ritual. There was only the moment and the smiles of the other bathers.

He thought of his new job. He did not consider himself a teacher in the professional sense. He felt more a student. Already in his first month on the job he was finding out how little he really knew about his own language. And he had had the audacity to call himself a writer! He believed himself lucky to have found the job. Perhaps it was the start of a new apprenticeship. Now he was in daily contact with the language and reexamining the fundamentals of language structure. He was becoming conscious once again of the words he chose to express himself in order to be as clear as possible. He was not now spewing forth a flood of words without regard to grammatical order or clarity as he had done in his first novel, which now seemed an amateurish attempt at a theme far beyond his capabilities. He knew his future writing would benefit. The students at the school came from all ages and walks of life. The conversations, particularly with the higher-level students, covered a wide range of topics. Harlan thought he could learn as much about Japan in his little teaching booth as he could traveling the entire country. He did not know how long the job would last as he was working illegally on a tourist visa. But for the time being his salary of 220,000 yen a month (for teaching eight hours a day, six days a week) would allow him eventually to pay off the key deposit on his apartment and put a little in his pocket. He could extend his travel visa for another three months in April. Beyond that he trusted in faith and good luck.

After his bath, Harlan decided to take a walk. He enjoyed walking the narrow, labyrinthine streets of the neighborhood, just as he had explored the many cities of his wanderings, always driven by hunger and thought. The architecture of the homes here was different from anything he had ever seen--the slated roofs, the ubiquitous gardens of trimmed shrubbery (each garden with its stone shrine and walls of stone or concrete), the narrow, wooden gates that looked as if they were made for dwarves.

He heard a strange sound like the blast of bagpipes. It had a mournful resonance. He heard it again. He ran through a dark alley and across a wider street to see where it was coming from. On the main street of the nearby shabby business district he saw a dim light moving. He caught up with the light. It was the soba noodle man blowing his horn and pulling his wooden cart.

A gruff-looking old man ordered a bowl of noodles. Harlan held up one finger as the old man had done. He stared in fascination as the soba man prepared the noodles. With swift, graceful movements, the soba man threw two portions of noodles into a pot of hot, steaming water, snapped two styrofoam bowls off a shelf, ladled broth out of another pot into the bowls, poured a shot of soy sauce into the bowls, scooped out the now-cooked noodles with a strainer, flipped them into equal-sized portions, slid them carefully into the bowls, grabbed a well-manicured assortment of vegetables and meat from some plastic containers, placed the assortment on top of the noodles, sprinkled some seasoning on top, and handed the bowls to the old man and Harlan. Clouds of steam rose into the night air. More customers gathered. Harlan and the old man slurped their noodles noisily. Harlan continued watching the soba man. It was as if he were witnessing the performance of a man who had found his niche in the world, accepted it, loved it, and made it his art.

Harlan finished his noodles and returned home. There was another letter from Sachiko in his mail slot. He had not noticed it earlier. He sat down at the kotatsu, pulled the blanket around his legs to keep warm, leaned back against the wall, and read the letter. She seemed not to have been shocked at finding Harlan in bed with Yoshiko a couple days before, but he could not be sure.

Sachiko was a mystery, but that intrigued Harlan. She was a dark, shy, good-looking woman whose reticence gave him an impression of condescension, but beneath that veil of silence lay a sensitive, brilliant mind. Although English was her third language, she possessed a greater vocabulary than any of the other students he had taught. She was familiar with all the books and writers he talked about. Harlan had the impression hers was an artistic soul trying to break free from her tangled emotions, her confusion, and the restrictions placed on her by Japanese society.

After Sachiko and her friend quit the school, Harlan received a letter from her. In the letter she expressed a warmth in having met him and an interest in a book he had recommended. He had bumped into her at the Nishinomiya train station a few days later while on his dinner break. They dined together, visited, and agreed to have dinner again that Sunday night. They met in Ashiya and she took him to a small restaurant she said was popular with foreigners. She had seemed at times aloof, lost in thought. Harlan did most of the talking. He gave her his manuscript to read and joked about her becoming his Japanese agent. Since that time he had received letters from her almost on a daily basis. He was getting to know her more through her letters than from any of their conversations. He had been surprised to find out that their brief dinner date was her first with a man. He could not have foreseen that she would be the first person to understand what he had attempted to express in his novel. She truly wanted to help him publish it. When she showed up at his apartment to return the manuscript, they agreed on her representing him. Then, they lay down together and he kissed her breasts and she took him orally.

Something about her bothered him. He felt he had merely taken advantage of the opportunity. He did not feel any passion for her, but he was attracted to her calm intellect. He did not feel comfortable with the way she seemed in awe of him. She seemed unable to speak to him directly, yet her letters revealed a complicated depth of emotion. She had written about the self-destructiveness of her emotions and the hatred she directed at herself. She seemed aware of who and what she was, but, at the same time, she was filled with a plethora of confusion. The world to her was empty, alien, meaningless. Harlan understood this feeling well. She was, in a sense, the female counterpart to the main character of his novel.

An icy blast of wind penetrated the room and Harlan shivered. A peculiar loneliness came upon him. It was the same feeling that had dogged him since his experiences in both Vietnam and India when the realization of the impermanence of all things, all relationships, had struck him so hard. His life since those experiences had been that of a moving, anonymous shadow among men. The ghost of India in particular still dwelled within him. It called him to return, to be shocked again into witnessing and experiencing how alone man really was and how eternally and vastly distant people were from one another.

He remembered his return to the States, to Seattle, where he had worked for a while as a stevedore on the docks before finding a job as a mailman for a firm of corporate lawyers. He passed the weekdays of that winter collecting and distributing mail to the 150 lawyers and secretaries who worked on the top three floors of the First National Bank building. His evenings and weekends were spent either pacing the wet Seattle streets or locked up in his skid-row room drinking cheap beer and smoking dope, reliving the Asian experiences in his mind, dwelling too much on the disparities between Asia and the United States, despising once again the country that had sent him and his generation to Vietnam, thinking of the States as an adolescent nation in need of waking to the realities of his Asian death-visions, first experienced in the war and most recently in India. It was as if he had possessed a prophetic vision of the decline and demise of the States and could therefore condescend to preach about it to those who did not know the horror and darkness of life the way it existed in many parts of the world.

Winter passed and the urge to move on consumed him. He drifted back down to California and worked as a cook first in Garberville and then in Monterey before heading to Texas to work on the oil rigs. Everywhere he went a misanthropy gnawed at his insides with a potency that nearly drove him mad. Everywhere he saw numbers of poor and drifting people searching for work in a portent of a new Great Depression: ex-cons, Vietnam veterans, scam men on the run from the law, drifters whose wives had left them, rednecks from Texas, Cajun coonasses from Louisiana, the many from Michigan and Ohio migrating to the South in droves like a cancer out of control.

He put his vision down on paper. Through the therapy of writing the story of what he had been through, he tried to exorcise the demons that clutched him so tightly. He wanted desperately to make sense of the insanity and cruelty of life and turn all of it into something positive.

The writing of the book exhausted him. He had poured all his passions and frustrations and anger into it. He moved on to the bleak, snow-covered emptiness of Wyoming and worked in an oil camp 20 miles outside Evanston until receiving a letter from Jeremy Boston, a writer friend who was then living on the island of Maui. Jeremy invited Harlan to visit and stay as long as he wanted.

The few months in Maui were tonic for his weary soul. Then his money began to run out. There was the possibility of going back to work in a tourist restaurant, but he was tired of the cooking trade. A change was called for. He felt the need to be jolted into a different reality. Jeremy was called back to the mainland to promote a new book and with him gone there was no need for Harlan to stay on the island. Jeremy suggested Harlan go to Japan, where the possibility of finding a job teaching English was said to be good. Jeremy gave Harlan some names and addresses of places to stay until getting set up. Two weeks later Harlan took a plane to Osaka.

Now he was in a foreign country again for the first time since he had left India. He wondered how long he would be able to stay in Japan. He wanted to stay at least long enough to become proficient in the language and save some money to finance the next step. But to where? India loomed large in his thoughts. Harlan got into his futon. There was a soft knock on the door. Yoshiko entered the apartment, silently took her clothes off, and slipped into the futon beside him. Harlan put his arms around her, grateful for the warmth of her body, and concentrated on the moment.