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she once told me it was not the boy but the love letters and little gifts and other such signs of passion that she really liked. It was love play that she wanted, not love itself. And you know how good most boys are at all that.
    As a present for my fifteenth birthday Izumi had given me an English-language copy of one of her favourite books, The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon , written a thousand years ago by a Japanese woman in her early twenties who was a lady-in-waitingat the court of the emperor’s first wife. Izumi explained that it’s one of the masterpieces of Japanese literature. We read many parts of it together, and soon it became one of my favourite books too. Sei Shōnagon seemed more alive to us, more ‘there’ than many of the people we met every day. This is sometimes the case with books, don’t you find? And it was because of Sei’s Pillow Book that I secretly started keeping my own.
    Now, ten months later, when I told Izumi of my sudden hunger for love poetry, she told me about the poetry written by other young Japanese women who lived around the same time as Sei Shōnagon. And particularly about Izumi Shikibu, after whom my Izumi had been named by her mother because she was a big fan of the long-dead but still-alive poet. This poet Izumi had numerous hot affairs, two of them with sons of the emperor, the second of which, Prince Atsumichi, was the true love of her life. When he died she composed hundreds of poems mourning her departed lover, which I think must be some of the best poems of love and grief ever written.
    All of Izumi Shikibu’s poems and of the other women’s are very short, what the Japanese call tanka . My Izumi could recite some of them by heart, in English translation as well as in Japanese, which she did that day she introduced them to me. After which I couldn’t wait to get my hands on them. A couple of days later she gave me a little Japanese notebook covered with traditional red ‘dragonfly’-patterned paper, into which she had copied in careful neat writing a selection of her own favourites. I treasure it, have added favourites of my own, and look forward to the day when the time has come to give it to you.
    Here is the poem by Izumi Shikibu that first drew me.
Wishing to see him,
to be seen by him –
if only he
were the mirror
I face each morning.
    It said exactly what I felt about Will. So short and simple, yet behind the simple words and between the few short lines there lies much more that cannot be said, or is best left unsaid. It was like a snapshot of my thoughts and like an x-ray of my feelings. It spoke of love without using any of the clapped-out over-cooked language I’d always sneered at. It and Izumi Shikibu’s other poems helped me see that in my own flush of love there was something wonderful and special to me that was not just a repeat performance of the same old experience everyone has had from the year dot.
    Something else. I felt as I read that little poem again and again that the words were mine, that I had written them, that the poem belonged in some particular and exclusive way to me. This made me want to write more of my mopes. Gave me the confidence to do so. Showed me the way. Gave me a model, a pattern to work to – a recipe for a different kind of dish from any I had made before. Which I did during the next few weeks, one after another, pouring all my passion for William into them.
    They make me smile with embarrassment now, some of them. And naturally, they’re mostly pale copies of the ones they were based on. But so what! As my English teacher, Ms Martin, told me, you have to start somehow, and how better than by imitating the best poems you can find? That’s the way you learn how to write. They helped me at the time, and I’m glad to have my first embarrassing mopes because they remind me more vividly than anything else of what I was and how I felt then. Better than photos or old clothes or school reports or mementos or souvenirs, however