One evening in the spring of 1936, when I was a boy of 14, my father took me to a dance performance in Kyoto. I remember only two things about it. The first is that he and I were Westerners in the audience; we had come from our home in the he' _ only Netherlands only a few weeks ² far 2 2 far so I had not adjusted to the cultural isolation and still felt it I was, after months of intensive study of the Japanese language, to find that I could now understand fragments of the conversations I overheard. As for the women dancing on the stage before me, I 7 remember nothing of them except a vague impression of brightly kimono. 19 yet The second is how 10 had no way of knowing that in a time and place as away as New York City nearly 50 years in the future, one among them would become my good friend and would dictate her extraordinary memoirs to me.
