A black and white piece of Japanese calligraphy in a gold frame hangs on the wall of the master bedroom at the house in Ossining. It’s a quotation from the writer Kawabata, who killed himself in 1972. “Do you know what that says?” my father asked me, as he lay there the Christmas before he died. I shook my head. Bright scraps of ribbon and paper from the Christmas presents littered the floor. My father looked up from the pillows. “Because you cannot see him, God is everywhere.”
