Plum Wine by Angela Davis - Gardiner

 The book is set in Japan during the 1960s and the two main characters are Barbara, an American, and Seiji, Japanese. There's a kind of mystery in that Barbara inherits a chest full of bottles of plum wine, each one bottled and labeled in a different year, from the 1930s onward. 

She meets Seijei, a potter, who volunteers to translate the papers wrapped around the bottles of plum wine.  Through the translated papers she discovers the life of Michi, a friend and fellow teacher, who left her the chest.  She finds out that Michi survived the bombing of Hiroshima, as did Seijei.

She falls in love with Seijei and has an affair with him. Something forbidden both by the school at which Barbara is a guest teacher and by Japanese culture.

I didn't like Seijei. He was weak, deceitful and manipulative.  The story was excellent. A masterfully told tale of love and loss.