There is a dry cleaner on my street in Tokyo. Behind the counter, in a cheap wooden frame, hangs one index card. Both sides are covered in English. Twenty-three different handwritings. I finally asked about it last month. The owner, Mr. Tanabe, is 79. He told me the whole story while he pressed my shirts. In 1966, his wife Fumiko was seventeen. She spent one summer as an exchange student in a small town in Minnesota. Her host family was named Lindquist. There was a lake. A wooden dock. Mrs. Lindquist taught her to swim off the end of it. Fumiko talked about that summer for the rest of her life. "Someday we'll go," she always said. "I'll show you the dock." They never went. The shop was open six days a week for fifty years. There was always next year. Two years ago, Fumiko got sick. Near the end, Mr. Tanabe made her a promise. "I'll take you back." Last summer, at 78, he got on a plane to Chicago with her ashes in his carry-on. He doesn't speak English. He had never been on a plane alone. His granddaughter wrote him one index card. "Hello. My name is Isamu Tanabe. I do not speak English. I am taking my wife home to a lake in Minnesota. Can you help me get to the next place?" He showed it to the first American he saw. She was a gate agent at O'Hare. She read it twice. Then she walked him all the way to the bus station herself. Before she let him go, she turned the card over and wrote on the back. "Walked him to the bus. Somebody take it from here. — Denise, O'Hare" The bus driver read Denise's line. He gave Mr. Tanabe the front seat, and wrote under her. "Front seat. Made sure he ate. — Big Mike" And it kept going. Every person who helped him wrote one line, so the next person would know. "He tried to pay for his eggs. Nope. — Tammy, truck stop, Wisconsin" "Drove him 140 miles out of my way. Worth every one. — R.J., trucker" "Found him on a bench at midnight. He slept at our house. My wife made pancakes. He cried. So did she. — Deputy Hanson" Twenty-three people. Four days. Not one of them knew who he was. Every one of them took him to the next place. On the fourth evening, he stood at the end of a gravel driveway in a town of 900 people. A woman came out on the porch. Karen Lindquist. 74. She had been nine years old the summer Fumiko came. Fumiko used to braid her hair. She looked at the old man. At the card. At the small wooden box. Then she came down the steps, took his hands, and said the only Japanese word she still remembered. "Okaeri." Welcome home. Karen had kept every letter Fumiko ever sent her. Fifty-eight years of them, in a shoebox. The next morning, Karen's grandsons rowed them out past the end of the old dock. The water was flat and gold. Mr. Tanabe opened the box and let his wife go into the lake where she learned to swim. Karen held his arm the whole time. That night, she took the card and wrote the last line on it. "Fumiko came home. — Karen Lindquist, her American sister" Mr. Tanabe flew back to Tokyo. He opened the shop the next morning, like always. Under the frame, there is a small strip of paper now. One line in Japanese, in his handwriting. I asked him to translate it for me. "I went to America to bring my wife home. America carried both of us." Twenty-three strangers. Not one of them asked why. Every one of them just took him to the next place.