Chapter 4: The Sumida

He found the ring that afternoon.

He hadn’t been looking for it. That was the thing. He’d sent Kenji on an errand and was walking back through the merchant district alone, which was either brave or foolish for a foreigner in Edo in April of 1868, and he turned down a narrow street looking for nothing in particular and found a small jeweler’s shop wedged between a lacquer merchant and a closed tea house.

The jeweler was Portuguese. Had been in Edo long enough to have acquired things that had no business being this far from anywhere. Reggie looked in the tray of European pieces out of the habit of a man who always looked at merchandise, and there it was.

A simple gold band. A single stone. Pale green, the color of new leaves in the moment just after rain when the light comes back and everything is more itself than it was before.

The color of her name.

Midori.

He stood there looking at it for a moment. Then he paid without negotiating, which was so unlike him that the Portuguese jeweler watched him leave with the expression of a man who had just witnessed something meteorological.

Reggie walked back to the villa with the ring in his breast pocket and spent the rest of the afternoon being completely useless at everything he attempted. He reviewed cargo manifests and retained nothing. He wrote half a letter to his shipping agent in San Francisco and stopped in the middle of a sentence. He sat in the garden and watched the river and the river watched him back without offering any advice.

Kenji returned and looked at him and said nothing, which was one of Kenji’s most valuable qualities.

It was Kenji who suggested the Sumida bank at Mukojima.

Or possibly Reggie had suggested it and Kenji had agreed with the speed of a man who recognized a moment that deserved a proper setting. Either way, by late afternoon they were walking east through streets that thinned as they approached the river road, the city noise falling away behind them, the sound of the Sumida coming up to meet them.

Midori walked beside Reggie. Miyu a few steps behind, the two of them talking in low Japanese, the sound of it like water over stones. Kenji on the other side of Reggie, hands in his pockets, looking at the middle distance with professional serenity.

The eastern bank was another world.

Willows trailing in the current. The cherry trees past their peak and into hana-fubuki now, the petal snowstorm, each breath of wind lifting them from the branches and setting them adrift. Pink and white on the grey water, drifting south toward the bay, toward the harbor, toward the open sea. The castle was somewhere behind them, invisible from here. The city was somewhere behind them. Out here there was only the river and the light going amber off it and the blossoms coming down with the unhurried patience of things that had been falling since before any of this mattered.

Midori stopped at the water’s edge and looked at it.

He watched her face. Something was happening in it that she wasn’t managing — not because she’d stopped trying but because the river wouldn’t let her. The beauty of it was simply too direct. It went past all her defenses and landed somewhere unprotected.