And how real was he to me? In a way, that is the exact question I’ve come here to try and answer. Excessively, seems like a tenable response. It didn’t take a perceptive genius to see that I’d made a legend of him, a one-man nation. I’d fashioned him into a Japan that was mine, and that wanted me just as I wanted it. In a sense, that didn’t seem like the worst of crimes; it was largely that instinct which I had to thank for my progress in Japanese, and if what I had done had hurt anybody, it was mostly myself. Besides, wasn’t that just what you did when you were young and you fell in love in a foreign country - you conflated person, language and land, and threw yourself at them immoderately? With time, maturity and healing, that bond eventually dissolved and was replaced by a more holistic form of social integration, and you moved on.