Imagine a Japanese man in Dhaka in the first decade of the twentieth century bent on being employed in the town and ending up marrying a Bengali Brahmo woman, the daughter of a soap factory owner, who has offered him a job. Think of the woman later going to a village near Nagoya with her husband (now a soap factory owner himself in Dhaka) to visit her in-laws, a few years before the First World War erupts. Imagine next the woman accompanying her husband to Japan once more at the outbreak of the Second World War, since the Japanese man is afraid of being jailed in British India.