My father was the barber of a little fishing village in Japan. The war took the life of his oldest son and all the money he had saved in cash for his retirement. I was born shortly before the war ended, as the youngest of 10. When I was 14, I left for Tokyo to study and find my way. Ten years later, I left for America to do more of the same. In America I fell madly in love with a girl, got married, and never returned to live in the village again. Simply stated, that is the story of my life.
     Today, that girl I fell in love with is dying.
     And I am forced to contemplate if there is actually more to the story of my life.
     There are, of course, the children.
     But where are they now? There were six, and not one is here. What had we done wrong?
     There was the prestige.
     There was the travel.
     These are the good things.
     There was the baby that died.
     The business that failed.
     But these things passed.
     I am 65 years old. What more can I add to the story of my life?
     I stare at my wife’s face as she lay comatose. I gingerly run a finger down her cheek, across her lips, over her brows. In my mind, I try to recompose her face as I saw it more than 30 years ago—her hair like seaweed, her eyes uneven in size, her eyebrows thick and bold, her mouth that opened wide to show all her teeth when she laughed. And I can hear her laughter, so loud and startling, as was her voice . . . so very un-Japanese, so very unfeminine. She captured all of me.
     “I hear you are moving. I can come help you,” I had offered the first time we spoke to each other.
     “Do you have a car?” she asked coolly.
     “No, but I have muscles,” I said proudly.
     She had laughed in my face. But she let me come. Years after, she still laughed whenever she told the story of how I showed up shivering in a thin jacket.
     “I felt so sorry for him. This thin little man in his thin little coat. How could I turn him away?” And she would guffaw. She left out the part of how she clung to me that night after we made love. She left out the part of how she would cry if I had to work long hours and was too exhausted to come see her. She left out many things. But I never pointed it out, not even to her. I always let her tell the story her way.
     She had been so open in those days, both in her affection and her fears. I had never met a woman so emotional. That summer we took many pictures together. On the back of them, I frequently wrote little poems. Our children would find them decades later and laugh, and I would laugh with them. What I never explained was that those poems, as foolishly naive as they were, expressed perfectly how we felt.
     “There is the ocean,the white sand, the sun . . . and you lying next to me,” I wrote on a picture of us at the beach. And that is how it was. Everything was as it should be, it seemed, in that moment.
     My fingers touch her hair, thinning and matted. Life slips through your fingers so quickly . . . and time, time is never on your side. And patience, patience is overrated. What good had patience done me?
     I had been the first to fail us—to fail the ideal of us. I had not had the strength to stand up for her when my family was cruel. The first time we visited Japan to show my aging father his granddaughter, they spoke evil words to her, and continued to thereafter. It had been unfair. She had not been at fault; indeed, they had never met her before. They hated her simply because she was the strange woman that had taken their son away. This nearly broke her. On my part, I could never get myself to apologize, being all too aware of the horrible betrayal I had committed. To acknowledge this, I felt, would destroy her, us, me. Somehow, I instinctively thought to diffuse the situation, to make light of it. Had it been a mistake? Had I underestimated her strength? But to me, she always seemed so delicate, despite her brash and reckless ways.Her soul seemed like a house made of glass.
     The rest of our marriage was my silent apology.
     I lived what I had been unable to speak, in hopes that someday, someday, she would understand.
     The bitterness never went away.
     Then the child died.
     Had I betrayed her again at that time? It’s all such a blur: the accident, the coma, the funeral, and the years afterwards . . .
     But she had other children since then, and she seemed to have recovered, to have come to terms with it. We stopped speaking of the child, and in all honesty, most days I don’t even think of her anymore. What is the use? There was nothing more we could do but move on. That is why when she wanted more children; I had agreed. I thought that was what she needed to heal.
     “We are going to give her more blood.” A nurse came in. I nodded silently and left the room to smoke a cigarette.
     How many more days would it be? And afterwards, what would happen?
     I cannot imagine an afterwards. The thought of her death brought on a sense of relief, which had been true even since before her illness. It had been true for a very long time, I realize with guilt. But at the same time, the thought of continuing to live without her made me feel like an unmoored ship. She had consumed all of me. Now in her absence, what did I have left? She had been so difficult. She drove everybody away, even our children. But in the end, I had stood by her. I had tried to redeem myself for my original sin.
     Never betray true love.
     I stamped out the first cigarette and lit another one.
     What if I had taken her back to my village, begged her to come home with me? A quarter of a century ago, she would have followed me to the end of the earth. What if I had protected her every day in front of her eyes against all the evil tongues? In the wake of her death, would I be where I am now?
     I lost myself in thought.
     When I shook myself into awareness, I realized that I had stayed away much longer than I had planned and that perhaps by now she was dead. I hurried back to the Intensive Care Unit.
     Upon entering the room, I was shocked.
     There was a woman sitting in the chair I had been sitting in. She was reading something aloud. I knew that she felt my presence, but she did not turn around. She continued to read. She read for a very long time. Finally she finished, and before she got up, she stroked my wife’s face in exactly the same way I had stroked it earlier that morning. Then she turned around and faced me.
     “Hello, Father.” She seemed calm. There were no tears, no distress, and no anger.
     “Hello.” I could find no other words. It had been so many years.
     She, too, did not say anything.
     Then, she turned and bowed low to her mother. She faced me again and, this time, bowed low to me. Before I could comprehend what had happened, she quietly slipped past me, out of the room.
     My wife died a few hours later.