This novel of a never-ending journey between the West and Japan reflects a new world of constant transition, a world in which love forms the reality and the dreams of the future.

The garden faced the Hydrangea Temple near the sea. It was one of those old tea-houses that have a verandah on all four sides to view the garden in all seasons. When it was the hydrangea season the big wild-grown flowers bowed down in the rain. I would press them to my face and drink the water gathered in their petals. They tasted lavender, blue and purple...

No-one lives here anymore, this is the house my mother bought for me to grow up in. It was here that I was looked after by a woman I called 'Aunty', while my mother worked as a geisha in Tokyo...

He had told me about the woman in the hospital... she had been his mistress for nine years, and now she was in a sanatorium. The room had glass windows on one side, facing the river which ran into the Imperial moat and you could see the same SNOW crystal neon sign from up high in his study.

Our bodies were bathed in sweat. My hair was twisted around him like a rope with its strands come undone...

Tokyo, lying below had looked like a big box of sparkling jewels. The first photos that he took of me, naked, sealed our relationship. My smiling eyes are looking into his, past the camera lens. Images of light and shadow, and his own vision of me...we spent many long afternoons taking photographs. Slowly he licked his thumb, and ran it around my nipple, to make it glisten wet...

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