At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.

As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.

I've lived my life again just telling it to you.

We can never flee the misery that is within us.

Those of us with water in our personalities don't pick where we'll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us

Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.

I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.