The Favorites

chapter 1

It was an early morning in June 1978, and the Ueno neighborhood was just beginning to stir.

This was an old neighborhood, far enough north of the city’s center to have the feel of a small village. It lay in the shadow of high green hills that surrounded the city of Kyoto like a giant horseshoe, trapping the moisture from its four rivers. A century ago, before the emperor’s seat had moved to Tokyo (and before smog and pollution made their appearance), this moist climate had been considered ideal for the refined senses of the nobility: it captured the subtle fragrances of each season and fostered the most delicate complexions in the country. The downside, of course, was that Kyoto summers were brutally humid.

Fortunately the air was still cool and crisp, laced with the smells of moss and verdure that had sprouted so lushly during this month’s rainy season. The walls and fences, their planks aged as soft and dark as velvet, reflected the pink glow of sunrise. Within cool pockets of shadow, the smell of dew-soaked wood still lingered.

At the open-air market, behind iron shop grates not yet rolled open for customers, rubber-booted fish vendors arranged the morning’s catch on beds of ice. Several blocks away, a procession of shaved, robed priests from So-Zen Temple clip-clopped on geta through the crooked, narrow lanes. “Aaaaaa…,” they intoned. “Ohhhhh…Ehhhhh…” They performed these vocal exercises each morning to develop stamina of the lungs, and indeed their deep, resonant voices rose up from their diaphragms and into the morning air like the long aftermath of a gong. All throughout the neighborhood, produce peddlers were beginning to make their appearance. These farming women, brown from the sun, came in each morning from the surrounding countryside. Noticeably shorter than their urban counterparts, they padded through the lanes on old-fashioned tabi shoes made of cloth, leaning their weight into wooden pushcarts and grinning up at customers from beneath the shade of white cloths draped under their straw hats. “Madam…? Good morning…,” they called out every so often, as a gentle signal to housewives in their kitchens.

None of this registered with fourteen-year-old Sarah Rexford, who slept soundly after yesterday’s long plane ride. She didn’t hear her mother rising from the futon beside her, or the priests’ distant chanting as they headed down Murasaki Boulevard on their way back to the temple complex, or the murmur of women’s voices directly outside in the lane-among which the excited tones of her mother and grandmother were mingled-as they gathered around a peddler’s cart.

The house in which Sarah slept had a gray tiled roof with deep eaves; its outer walls were left unpainted in order to display the wood’s aged patina, which had deep chestnut undertones like the coat of a horse. This had been her mother’s childhood home, but only her grandparents lived here now. The house stood on a corner, where a narrow gravel lane intersected a slightly wider paved street that fed into Murasaki Boulevard. Each summer the Kobayashi house attracted attention because of its morning glory vines, whose electric-blue blossoms blanketed the entire eastern side of the house. The locals-housewives walking to the open-air market, entire families strolling to the bathhouse after dinner-often altered their routes in order to admire the view. As Mrs. Kenji Kobayashi liked to tell people, she had nurtured these vines from a single potted plant that her granddaughter Sarah had given her eight years ago: a first-grade science project, grown from seed. The younger generation of adults would nod, remarking fondly that they’d had the same assignment as children, that they could remember documenting the seedlings’ growth in sketch journals. Under Japan’s public school system, all schools used the same government-issued textbooks.

Sarah Rexford hadn’t attended a Japanese school since she was nine years old. That was the year she and her parents had moved away to America, after selling their home up in the Kyoto hills. There were various reasons for this move, one being that they thought it might be easier for Sarah to be with “her own kind,” meaning children who wouldn’t stare at her on the street or bully her after school. She was a mixed child, or as they said in Japan, a “half.” Her features, however, were predominantly Western: straight nose, light gray eyes, dark wavy hair with brown highlights instead of blue.

The marriage of her mother, Yoko, to John Rexford, an American physicist almost old enough to be her father, had shocked everyone back in the early sixties. The match was particularly unusual because Kyoto was a traditional inland city, far removed from the seaports and military bases where such unions (euphemistically speaking) were known to occur. Fortunately Mr. Rexford was a civilian, a physicist at NASA. If he had been a military “GI,” with all the unsavory connotations of that label, the Kobayashi family would not have been able to hold up their heads.

As the years passed and Yoko was neither abandoned nor mistreated by her American husband, the Ueno neighbors gradually came to accept the marriage. Some even suggested, as a graceful way of putting the scandal to rest, that the match had been ordained by fate. As they pointed out, it seemed prophetic in hindsight that the temple astrologer, on whom local parents relied for auspicious Chinese characters when naming their babies, had chosen for Yoko’s name an unconventional hieroglyph associated with the Pacific Ocean.

And the neighbors agreed (how clear it seemed, looking back!) that Yoko Kobayashi had always been destined to lead a bigger, bolder life than her peers. Even as a child, there had been a larger-than-life quality about her-a striking air of confidence, bordering on effrontery, that was apparent in her firm step and erect posture. This wasn’t the result of wealth or privilege. The Kobayashis had no money, although like other families with good crests who had been ruined in the war, they still held remnants of their old status. Nor was Yoko unusually beautiful, although her features were above average. In fact, her face had been memorable for its expression of mature comprehension, better suited to a grown woman, rather than the limpid, innocent gaze that was so highly prized in Japanese children.

A more likely explanation for Yoko’s charisma was her range of accomplishments. All throughout her academic career, with the exception of one year, she had been ranked first in her class. She was captain of the girls’ high school tennis team. Twice, she won a certificate-a fifth-place and a third-in the annual municipal haiku contest held for adults. She passed Kyoto University’s notorious entrance exam, the nemesis of ambitious young men from all over the country. Long after she married and left home, she continued to hold the record as the youngest pupil ever to have performed a solo at one of Mrs. Shimo’s autumn koto recitals. She had been six years old.

Despite her achievements, Yoko Kobayashi was down-to-earth and shomin-teki, “of the people.” The only time she abused her powers (although she preferred not to see it in quite that light) was when she defended the weak: a classmate bullied on the playground or, as she grew older, an adult belittled in “polite” conversation. Then Yoko’s killer instinct arose and she was at her cruel, cutting best. As a result, some of her staunchest supporters belonged to the social classes beneath her. They were former schoolmates who had grown up to become silk weavers, vendors, or shopkeepers.

Over this past week, Mrs. Kenji Kobayashi had used her daughter’s history to her advantage, enlisting the shopkeepers’ expertise in choosing uncharacteristically expensive cuts of fish and the choicest slices of filet mignon. Although Mrs. Kobayashi was not as socially democratic as her daughter, Yoko, she was nonetheless admired for the cool elegance of her etiquette and poise. It was widely known that before her marriage, she had grown up in one of Kobe ’s most exclusive seaside neighborhoods. Perhaps it was the cosmopolitan sophistication of her birthplace-not to mention her pleasing height-that gave Mrs. Kobayashi the flair for carrying off, to such dashing effect, those Western-style clothes that almost everyone wore nowadays. “I’ll take some of this Kobe beef, for Yoko and her daughter. They’re coming to visit from America,” she told the butcher, and in the same breath wondered aloud-almost as if talking to herself-whether it would be at all possible to adjust the price.

“For you, madam, certainly,” he assured her. He could hardly say no.

“It’s their first time back in five years…,” Mrs. Kobayashi explained, and it was understood that today’s favor would be balanced out by increased sales over the course of the visit. The butcher remembered the little “half” girl, wheedling her elders to buy this or that in an impeccable Kansai dialect that was completely at odds with her Caucasian features.

Mrs. Kobayashi’s purchases now lay, shrink-wrapped and waiting, inside her tiny icebox. Some of them, like the sweet bean condiments and slices of teriyaki eel (for restoring strength to tired bodies), were already laid out on the table along with the usual breakfast staples: sweet omelettes, hot rice in a linen-draped wooden tub, julienned carrots and burdock roots cooked in mirin and soy sauce, a tall tin of dried seaweed, umeboshi with shiso leaves. A stack of lacquered bowls awaited the miso soup, which would be prepared at the last minute with skinny enoki mushrooms and tender greens. Mackerel steaks, sprinkled liberally with salt and broiling on the grill, filled the house with their savory aroma.

At the opposite end of the house, Sarah slowly awakened to the low, liquid burbling of pigeons in the lane. She had forgotten about the pigeons-there weren’t any back home in Fielder’s Butte, California. Their contented bubbling struck a deep chord in her memory; suddenly she was a little girl again, half-asleep, cradled by the sounds and textures of her early childhood. She listened, eyes shut, cheek unmoving against the buckwheat-husk pillow. Other long-lost sounds emerged: the kitchen door sliding open and shut, its glass panels rattling softly in the aged wooden frame; a newly hatched cicada starting a feeble meen meen in the garden. Years later, when she listened to pigeons as an adult, their sound would be overlaid by the magic of this moment, as she wavered in time on a Japanese summer morning.

chapter 2

Although Sarah Rexford had been sitting at the low-level breakfast table for less than an hour, her brain was already overloaded. For one thing, the Japanese conversation was fast. For another, there was an unexpected strangeness about all the things that should have been familiar. Her grandmother’s traditional table setting, for instance, struck her for the first time as something exotic. Over the last five years, Sarah had grown used to the plain white Corelle back home in California. Now she was fascinated by the toylike arrangement before her: tiny porcelain bowls for rice, tiny lacquered bowls for miso soup. In the center of the table was a cluster of artfully mismatched bowls, each holding a different condiment that everyone picked out with chopsticks and placed on individual dishes that were one third the size of saucers. Sarah picked up each dish as if it were a museum piece, cradling it in both hands in order to savor its shape and heft. One was a rustic, pitted ceramic glazed with summer hues of ecru and blue; another was a paper-thin porcelain of misty lime, upon which a single bamboo stem was etched in white brushstrokes.

“Mother! This takuan is amazing!” exclaimed Mrs. Rexford, munching vigorously on a slice of pickled daikon radish. “Where did you get this?”

“I made my own this year,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “You should take some home with you.” Her expression brightened, as if she was about to discuss the pickle making, but she stopped herself. Her husband was about to speak.

Mr. Kenji Kobayashi was a handsome man in his sixties, permanently browned from years of tennis and golf. He designed avant-garde jewelry for a living. While extremely social in public-he was popular with both men and women-he was absentminded at home, as if conserving energy for his outside pursuits. When conversing with children, he often gave the impression of being slightly irrelevant, slightly off the mark. “So how many slices of bread,” he now asked his granddaughter, “does an American person eat in a single day?”

“Saa-at least four,” Sarah said. “Two slices of toast for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch…dinner’s usually something else, like noodles or potatoes. But some people eat dinner rolls too, along with the main course.” She glanced at her mother for confirmation, which was out of character for her. Back home, Sarah was a know-it-all; she was quick to correct her mother’s English mistakes, or her gaps in Western knowledge, with contemptuous finesse. But this switch in turf had wrought some change in Mrs. Rexford, giving her the relaxed authority she lacked in America. The girl sensed this, as dogs sense the subtle ups and downs of their masters, and already the balance of power had shifted between them.

Mr. Kobayashi continued his interrogation. “So do you eat breakfasts like this in America?” he asked.

“Sometimes. But not very often. Mama usually makes eggs and toast and orange juice. And sometimes pancakes, because my father and I like pancakes.”

“Pancake…?” said Mrs. Kobayashi.

“She means hotcakes,” Mrs. Rexford explained.

“Aaa, hotcakes!” Mrs. Kobayashi nodded her understanding. “How tasty!”

Sarah wished her grandfather would stop asking these questions. She felt the old, familiar shame of being singled out for her foreignness. She remembered her early childhood here in Japan, how it had felt to board a streetcar or walk down a street: the baleful stares of children, the frank curiosity of vendors or those weaving people who lived on the other side of Murasaki Boulevard. Such people, of course, were the minority; their social graces were less polished than the rest of the population. But they betrayed the truth behind everyone else’s tactful facades of indifference. Young Sarah, who had grown up among Japanese faces (with the exception of her father, the only foreigner she knew), felt taken aback herself each time she passed a shop window and caught a glimpse of her own reflection: a pointy nose sprinkled with freckles, a sharp chin that was severe, almost foxlike, compared to the softer, more pleasing contours of those around her.

To shift the subject away from America, she announced to the table at large, “Granny Asaki waved to me from her balcony this morning.”

Mrs. Asaki, or Granny Asaki as she was known in the neighborhood, was Mr. Kobayashi’s elder sister. A longtime widow, she lived kitty-corner down the gravel lane with her daughter, her son-in-law, and her two grandchildren. The two houses, while bound by close ties, had something of an uneasy relationship. It had never occurred to Sarah to wonder why; she simply accepted it as the nature of her family.

As Sarah had anticipated, her mother and grandmother turned toward her with an air of sharp interest that, in the presence of Mr. Kobayashi and herself, they attempted to disguise with expressions of kindly disinterest.

“You saw her already? How nice,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “Did she happen to be hanging up something on the clothesline?” The two women exchanged a brief, sardonic glance.

Sarah nodded importantly. This had happened less than half an hour ago. She had folded up the futon comforters, stowed them in the closet, and was heading toward the dining room when she was struck by a sudden urge to see the garden where she had played so often as a little girl. Hurrying over to the wall of sliding glass doors that opened out onto the garden, she had thrown open the heavy, floor-length drapes. The metal rollers slid back with a shhh, like a receding wave, and the room was suffused with green light.

The garden was pleasantly unchanged-although smaller than she remembered-with the same four-legged stone lantern in one corner and the familiar stepping-stones spaced at artistically irregular intervals. The roof’s extended eaves cut off the sky, intensifying the effect of mass foliage: maple and yuzu and bamboo and camellia, all at the peak of summer lushness.

From a slightly stooped position Sarah could peer up, under the eaves and over the wooden fence and the dwarf yuzu tree, and get a good view of Granny Asaki’s second-story balcony. Mrs. Asaki was pinning up handkerchiefs and socks on the clothesline. She, too, was unchanged: small and spry, with the faint beginnings of a hunchback, and dyed black hair slicked into a small bun at the nape of her neck. Immediately spotting the girl’s face at the window, the elderly woman leaned over the wooden railing and vigorously waved a wet handkerchief, causing a large crow to flap up from a nearby pine branch. Sarah waved back.

“It was almost like she’d been watching our house,” Sarah now reported to her mother and grandmother. From past experience, she knew that any evidence of Mrs. Asaki’s nosiness was guaranteed to hold their attention. But the Japanese code of conduct deemed that children-even teenagers-should remain unsullied by any awareness of adult conflict, so Sarah made her remark with an air of bland innocence.

To her satisfaction, the women once again exchanged knowing glances.

“Granny Asaki has sharp eyes,” said Mrs. Rexford dryly. Then, catching herself, she switched to a tone of bright geniality. “Not nearsighted, like the rest of us! Her health is remarkable, especially for someone her age…it must be the good family genes! Ne, Father?”

Mr. Kobayashi, who shared his elder sister’s robust health, chuckled with pleased pride, and his wife murmured that good health was indeed a quality to be envied. The two women turned back to Sarah with expectant faces. Then, perceiving that this was the extent of the girl’s contribution, they drifted off to another topic.

“That reminds me,” said Mrs. Kobayashi several minutes later, “I think you and Sarah should go visit them first. They usually finish breakfast by eight thirty. So eat fast and run over there, quick, before they show up here.”

“Why shouldn’t they show up here?” Mrs. Rexford said. Relaxed and smiling, she made no attempt to eat faster. “I’m the older one. Masako should come to me, even if her husband’s a little older than I am.”

“No, no,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “Forget Masako’s husband. Granny Asaki’s the real head of that house. And she outranks our head…” She nodded toward her own husband, whose face was obscured by the lacquered bowl from which he was drinking.

“But, Mother, it’s not Granny who’s going to be coming over. Everyone knows I’ll pay her my formal respects during visiting hours. We’re just talking about my generation.”

“There is no such thing,” said Mrs. Kobayashi, “as just my generation.” She glanced surreptitiously at her husband. He was drinking a mixture of rice and tea with loud abandon, clearly uninterested in the conversation.

Mrs. Kobayashi leaned forward and silently mouthed the words Be careful. The women’s expressions were no longer amused but grave.

Watching this, Sarah felt the first stirring of curiosity.

Mrs. Rexford looked up at the clock. Sarah followed her gaze. The clock was a shiny modern piece, incongruous with the aged wall post on which it hung. The wooden post dated back to a more traditional time, when aesthetically minded craftsmen used to leave small remnants of nature in their work. Each wall post in the room retained some individual quirk: a curious burl, or the serpentine tracks of beetle larvae just below the surface of the wood.

“A little more rice, Father-san?” Mrs. Kobayashi asked, holding out her hand in anticipation of her husband’s empty bowl. They waited in silence while he drank down the last drop.

“Aaa,” he said, handing the bowl over. He then turned to Sarah. “Do people in America talk this much about manners?” he asked. “They just do whatever they feel like, right? Anytime they want?”

“Soh, pretty much.” She giggled politely, and her grandfather chuckled with her. But there was more to this than etiquette. What it was she couldn’t say, but there was definitely something more.

chapter 3

Someone was tapping on the frosted glass panels of the kitchen door. The women froze, chopsticks in midair, and looked up at the clock. It was far too early! Only a quarter after eight!

But it was just the two little girls from the Asaki house, ages eight and eleven. They had slipped away from their mother in their eagerness to come early. They stood bashfully outside the kitchen door, peering up at the breakfast scene. They had to look up, since the vestibule was a foot above ground level and the main tatami floor was another two feet above that.

Instantly the energy of the house altered; there were peals of excited laughter from the women, exclamations of “Come on up! Don’t be shy!” and “Look, Sarah, you have visitors!” There was a flurry to fetch additional floor cushions, which were encased in summer cotton covers of white and blue to suggest the coolness of ice and water. Room was made at the breakfast table, a tin of chocolates brought down from the cabinet. Mr. Kobayashi, outnumbered by all the females, picked up his cup of green tea and wandered off to a quieter room. On his way out, he stooped down and affectionately ruffled the little girls’ heads as they bent over to line up their sandals properly in the small cement vestibule. Grinning up at him, the barefooted girls clambered up the high wooden step onto the tatami mats.

There was no choice now but to stay and entertain them; this resolved the etiquette dilemma for both houses involved. Sarah wondered if the girls’ mother, also unsure as to the best policy, had purposely turned a blind eye. If so, it had been a tactful move on her part.

“Look at you both, how big and fine you’ve grown!” Mrs. Rexford cried, grasping each girl’s shoulder with a Western-style physicality that Sarah had never seen her use back home in America.

Clearly smitten, the two little girls beamed up at her.

“So healthy and brown!” Mrs. Rexford’s face glowed with heightened emotion. It was years since she had laid eyes on real Japanese children. Yesterday at the airport, she had followed her fellow Japanese travelers with avid eyes, remarking wistfully that in her youth, she had never really appreciated the cuteness of Asian babies. Sarah, vaguely stung by this comment, had made a noncommittal grunt.

The two girls sat down, their eyes moving rapidly over the elaborate breakfast spread. They looked nothing like the chubby little girls of five years ago. They had the same slender build, doll-like bangs, and high Kobayashi cheekbones that Mrs. Rexford had in old photographs.

Mrs. Kobayashi, as if thinking along these same lines, sighed. “You know, Yo-chan,” she said, “they remind me so much of you as a child.” Sarah felt a stab of jealousy.

Little Yashiko, her tan accentuated by a white tank top, eyed Sarah’s pale arms with timid curiosity. “Do children play outdoors in America?” she asked.

“Yes, of course,” said Sarah. “But I have to be careful so I don’t burn and peel.” The girls looked mystified. Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Rexford and even their own mother were every bit as white as Sarah, but in their youth they had all been brown. It was a rite of passage: Japanese girls stayed in the sun until adulthood, upon which they switched standards and adopted pale makeup and shielded their complexions with parasols.

Momoko, the elder girl, politely changed the subject. “Auntie Mama,” she said, using the Western title as if it were a proper name. “Can Big Sister Sarah come with us to Morning Tai Chi Hour, Auntie Mama? We already got her a summer pass.”

“What an excellent idea!” cried Mrs. Rexford and Mrs. Kobayashi at the same time, which made everyone laugh. Sarah and Momoko exchanged shy looks of friendship. They had been playmates before Sarah’s move but now they were self-conscious, preferring to use the adults’ easy conversation as their conduit.

“Do they still do tai chi at Umeya Shrine, like they used to?” Mrs. Rexford asked. Momoko nodded importantly. She replied using some advanced phrase with which Sarah wasn’t familiar: something about public office, or maybe community organization. “Teacher Kagawa’s in charge of it this year,” she added.

“Kagawa?” Mrs. Rexford turned to her mother. “Any relation to that family near the park?”

“Yes, yes! That’s the one,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “Remember Emiko had a little sister? She’s teaching at Tendai Elementary now.”

“Ah, really!” Mrs. Rexford turned back to Momoko. “When your teacher was little,” she told the girl, “she used to come to me for tutoring.” Her lips parted in a proud, careless smile, and Sarah suddenly realized that her mother was beautiful.

It was becoming increasingly clear that she had underestimated her mother. Ever since their arrival in Japan, Mrs. Rexford had exuded the same air of relaxed entitlement that Sarah had observed in popular girls back home. Sarah herself was not popular; it was unsettling to be reminded that her mother belonged in a higher social league than her own. She felt embarrassed now, remembering all the times she had taken advantage of her mother’s ineptness in English. One fight in particular she wished she could forget. Her mother, struggling to articulate the proper comeback, had turned away too late to hide tears of frustration. Their argument had stopped instantly. Mother and child, both stricken, had tried to pretend nothing happened.

Yoko Rexford was twenty-five years old when she and her husband first moved to America. They had stayed there ever since, with the exception of a few years when they lived in the Kyoto hills. Yoko’s social dominance did not survive this move, although the proud posture and intelligence were innately hers. Her college-level English was good, but it lacked the elegant execution with which she had been used to cutting down opponents or carving out poetry. Her stature in the community, which she had always democratically pooh-poohed, was suddenly gone.

Ever practical, young Mrs. Rexford had channeled her energies into more realistic pursuits: gardening, cooking, needlework, all of which she tackled with her old academic zeal. Each Saturday she visited the town’s small, outdated library, borrowing cookbooks by James Beard and Julia Child (as a new bride, not knowing what American men ate for breakfast, she had prepared for her bemused husband an elaborately arranged tray of fruit and nuts). She punched down homemade bread dough with arms still sculpted from tennis, experimented with coq au vin and crepes suzette. She executed complex projects of lace tatting, crewel embroidery, traditional American quilt patterns. In time, she became an expert in all the skills that modern American women had long since abandoned.

Sometimes she remembered, with the same wistful wonder with which amputees remember running, how it had felt to have all the right skills at her disposal, to have powers commensurate with the force of her personality. She fervently admired the tennis star Martina Navratilova. “She never plays it safe by trying to be liked,” she told her husband. “She just goes out on the court, with no one cheering for her, and still beats every last one of them. Oh, I envy her that feeling!”

If Sarah could have probed to the bottom of her fourteen-year-old heart, she would have found there a pity for her mother that was too deep, and too painful, to be faced directly.

Meanwhile, at the breakfast table, she struggled to follow the rapid-fire conversation all around her. She felt an unfamiliar clenching between her temples. It occurred to her that her mother must experience this same clenching back home, as a result of the permanently strained vigilance with which she braced herself for American speech. Mrs. Rexford’s English, although heavily accented and occasionally halting, was always grammatically correct; never, at any time, did she allow herself to lapse into pidgin.

But judging from her mother’s manner at the table, there was no such tension now. She was eating heartily, interrupting the chatter every so often with a dramatic moan of appreciation for her mother’s cooking, as if she hadn’t eaten a square meal in years.

“Mother, this is absolutely delicious,” Mrs. Rexford said, using her chopsticks to herd together some scattered flakes of leftover mackerel. “It’s exactly the way I remembered it.” A floodgate of appetite seemed to have opened up within her. She couldn’t stop eating. “Have some,” she urged little Yashiko who was sitting beside her, still too shy to speak.

Then, looking over at Sarah’s fish plate, she exclaimed, “Ara! You haven’t touched the skin at all. You don’t like it?”

“There’s this thick layer of fat on the inside.”

“But that’s where the best flavor is!” Mrs. Rexford looked insulted.

“I’ll eat it,” piped up Yashiko.

“Good girl!” said Mrs. Rexford warmly. “We can’t let this go to waste, now can we?”

“Aaa, that’s how you can spot a true-blue Japanese,” laughed Mrs. Kobayashi. “Even the prime minister himself, I bet, wouldn’t say no to salt-broiled mackerel skin.”

Reaching over with her chopsticks, Mrs. Rexford picked up the strip of skin, which was toasted to a bubbly brown crisp and frosted with salt, and transferred it from Sarah’s rectangular fish plate to her own. Their eyes met, then looked away.

Something like pity flickered over Mrs. Rexford’s face. “The child can’t help it,” she said quickly. “They don’t even sell mackerel in the stores back home. Did you know that on the East Coast, where John grew up, oily fish was considered lower grade? They actually preferred the bland white types like sole or flounder.”

“Hehh?!” cried Mrs. Kobayashi in amazed disbelief. She and Momoko darted a quick, curious glance at Sarah, as if the explanation for such a peculiar fact might somehow be detected in her American face. Little Yashiko, nestled against Mrs. Rexford, finished off the mackerel skin with quiet efficiency.

chapter 4

At 8:30 on the dot, Masako Nishimura arrived to apologize for her daughters’ untimely intrusion.

Mrs. Nishimura and Mrs. Rexford gave off such different energies, it was hard to believe they were cousins. On closer scrutiny, however, one could see they shared the same high cheekbones from the Kobayashi side. Sarah had seen old school photographs in which they looked virtually identical with their bobbed hair, cat’s-eye glasses, and young, unformed expressions. More than once, leafing through the Asaki album with her great-aunt looking over her shoulder, Sarah had gotten them mixed up. Mrs. Asaki would correct her patiently, murmuring, “It’s a strong family likeness, ne…”

Over the years, the women’s faces and even their bodies had evolved to reflect their different personalities. Mrs. Rexford’s confident posture, and the hint of muscle in her arms and calves, were natural extensions of her personal strength. In contrast, Mrs. Nishimura was less substantial, almost ethereal. She had a physique more suited to traditional kimonos: narrow, sloping shoulders; a walk that was an unobtrusive glide, as opposed to her cousin’s firm, decisive stride.

When it came to faces, Mrs. Nishimura wore one basic expression: one of pleasant, attentive cooperation. It was a classic “outside face.” Every well-bred person used it at some point, usually on formal occasions or with strangers. Westerners, who were its most frequent recipients, assumed-understandably, if incorrectly-that this Japanese veneer of politeness was a permanent condition. And with Mrs. Nishimura, that may indeed have been the case. One always sensed in her a certain emotional reserve, even in the most casual situations.

Mrs. Rexford was the opposite. Among her Ueno neighbors, she frequently dropped her mask to show spontaneous reactions: affection, enthusiasm, gossipy fascination. In truth, these flashes of emotion were not always so spontaneous or genuine. But Mrs. Rexford, blessed with surer social instincts, understood the value of judicious lapses in etiquette. Since childhood, she had used this technique to downplay her achievements and make herself more approachable. Since this familiarity was used from a position of power, it gave the flattering illusion of inner-circle acceptance.

“I’m so sorry about the girls,” Mrs. Nishimura now said in a voice as gentle as her face. Instead of standing squarely within the doorway, she peered around the sliding door in the pose of a hesitant intruder. “Bothering you, right in the middle of your breakfast…”

Mrs. Rexford laughed and waved away the apology. “Anta, don’t be silly! Children will be children!” she cried, throwing an affectionate look at the girls. “Ma-chan, how have you been?”

Mrs. Nishimura decided to scold her daughters anyway. “Kora,” she admonished them softly. Momoko and Yashiko grinned with guilty embarrassment.

“Come up and have some tea!” said Mrs. Kobayashi, already pouring out an extra cup.

Mrs. Nishimura stepped up into the small vestibule. She still wore the short bob of her college photos, parted on one side and pinned with a barrette. There was a sheltered, almost virginal quality about her, emphasized by a pale pink blouse with a Peter Pan collar. As a child Sarah had subconsciously registered the shades and shapes that, like abstract art, made up her “auntie”: the round bob above the round collar, the pastel clothing against the whitish cast of Japanese cosmetics. These combinations struck a deep chord of recognition within her, like the sound of the pigeons earlier that morning.

Once again, the currents in the house altered. Although it was relaxed and intimate, there was now a slightly guarded quality that hadn’t been there before. It was as if two identical masks of kindness had dropped over Mrs. Kobayashi’s and Mrs. Rexford’s faces.

They all sat cozily around the low table, ignoring the uncleared breakfast dishes. Now the conversation no longer included the children but circled among the adults. Sensing this, Sarah and Momoko began talking to each other in low voices.

“Mama and I are coming over to your house later,” Sarah said. “We’ll probably bring French pastries, or maybe a cake.”

“What kind? Do you know yet?”

“I’m not sure-we still have to go to the bakery.”

“What are you doing later? Do you want to come up and play in our room?”

Little Yashiko, who had sidled over to sit beside her big sister, murmured that she had once tasted lemon custard cake, and she had liked it.

Having thus reestablished their friendship, the three girls were content to fall silent and eat chocolates out of the tin, all the while following the adults’ conversation.

“…a mere toddler! He was kicking that ball, running after it, kicking it, running after it, so excited…” Mrs. Kobayashi was reminiscing about one of their neighbors’ sons, a young man who had recently moved to Berlin to study under the famous conductor Seiji Ozawa. “Laughing and drooling, with that soccer ball practically up to his knees…”

The children shrieked with laughter. Mrs. Nishimura rocked with mirth, demurely covering her open mouth with her hand.

“And he went right on going, out of sight!” Mrs. Rexford chimed in. “Just vanished over the horizon, like in some surrealist movie! You should have seen those little legs working, choko-choko-choko…” Mrs. Rexford and Mrs. Kobayashi worked well as a team. Their chemistry was so bright, it seemed to suck the air right out of the room.

They were all laughing so much that no one heard the footsteps on the gravel or the kitchen door rolling open. Suddenly Mrs. Asaki was standing in the doorway, smiling. “Good morning!” she chirped, in that singsong cadence of Kyoto old-timers.

There was a moment of surprised silence before Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Rexford jumped up from their cushions. Even Sarah felt somehow caught in the act. “Ara, Granny-san!” Mrs. Rexford protested. “Sarah and I are supposed to visit you! We were waiting until ten o’clock!”

“We’re so embarrassed!” added Mrs. Kobayashi, even though it was Mrs. Asaki who was clearly breaking the rules.

With both hands, Mrs. Asaki waved their words away. “Maa maa, everybody so formal!” She laughed. “What does it matter? We’re all family!” Here the old woman cocked her head, like some coquettish bird, and appealed to Sarah-“Ne?”-as if the two of them were the only sane people in the room. Sarah, unable to keep from smiling in delight, agreed with a vigorous nod and an “Nnn!”

“Wait! Let me heat up some more tea,” said Mrs. Kobayashi, rushing across the tatami and down the wooden step. The kitchen, which was an extension of the vestibule, stood on a lower level than the rest of the house. The architecture was a carryover from a bygone era when women had done their cooking away from the main house, in lean-tos or covered porches.

“No no, don’t bother on my account.” Mrs. Asaki climbed up onto the tatami and looked around at everything with her bright eyes.

Mrs. Rexford was waiting for her in an open space away from the others, seated with legs folded beneath her and fingertips pressed to the floor. “Sarah!” she hissed in her obey-me-now voice. Sarah scurried over and assumed the position next to her mother, self-conscious because everyone else was watching with interest.

Mrs. Rexford bowed first, barely giving Mrs. Asaki enough time to get down on her elderly knees. She had a finely trained bow that put the older lady’s to shame, and she was fully conscious of this advantage. Mrs. Kobayashi, unlike her sister-in-law, had a background of rigorous training in formal etiquette associated with the high arts, and she had ensured that her daughter received this same training. Mrs. Rexford’s skill was evident in the way she pulled back her shoulders and arched, catlike, to the floor.

“My mother, my daughter, and I,” she said, shifting into a refined, inflectionless tea-ceremony voice, “live perpetually in your debt.” She timed her bow so that its lowest point coincided with the end of her sentence. “With your gracious permission”-here she lifted her head from the floor and paused, then slowly began rising back up-“we remain indebted to your kind regard during this coming visit”…she straightened up to a sitting position for full effect, fingertips still poised on the floor…“and for many more years to come.” She bowed once again, this time in silence. She knew it intimidated Mrs. Asaki to be faced with such a display of formality, and this knowledge somehow compensated for the fact that her flustered mother was down in the kitchen, scrambling to put together a pot of company-quality sencha tea.

Mrs. Asaki returned the bow with an appropriate response. Mrs. Rexford then looked pointedly at her daughter.

Now was the time for Sarah to bow correctly, as she had been taught. She counted silently to herself-one million one, one million two, one million three-timing her bow to end at the count of three. She could hear someone unwrapping a chocolate. Spine straight. Rear end down. It was a difficult, almost athletic feat. Her mother, trying to coach her a month before their visit, had said despairingly that a good bow just couldn’t be faked, any more than a dancer’s pirouette could. It took too long to train the right muscles. A bow was an acid test of one’s daily habits.

Sarah returned to a full sitting position before she realized she had forgotten to utter a single word. She had learned a simple speech, something to the effect that she was happy to be back and grateful for Mrs. Asaki’s kindness. But she couldn’t remember a word of it.

“Well done, well done!” Mrs. Asaki sang out with her cheerful cackle, and clapped her age-spotted hands.

“Granny-san,” said Mrs. Rexford, returning to a tone of affectionate familiarity that her daughter nonetheless suspected was an “outside” voice, “sit down here on my cushion. Ne, please.” She smoothed the cotton fabric in a deferential gesture of invitation. Mrs. Asaki accepted, ducking her head in a pleased quarter-bow, and Mrs. Rexford went away to help her mother with the tea. “Sarah,” she called back over her shoulder, switching once again to a disciplinary tone, “clear those dirty dishes off the table. Quickly!”

Sarah obeyed. Carrying the loaded clearing tray with both hands, she stepped down into the kitchen, feeling with her bare foot for the wooden step she couldn’t see. She liked her grandmother’s kitchen, with its vaguely primitive, backstage atmosphere that was so different from the rest of the house. It had a long narrow floor lined with wooden planks. Overhead were high exposed rafters blackened by years of smoke, from which a lanternlike fixture hung at the end of a long rope. Best of all, a miniature door opened right out onto the street so they could trade with vendors.

Here in the narrow kitchen, Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Rexford were standing side by side. It was the only way they could both fit. Their backs were to Sarah, so they didn’t notice her approach. A newly arranged tray of tea utensils lay at the edge of the counter, ready to be carried up to the guests. Mrs. Kobayashi was lining up individually wrapped tea cakes on another tray beside it. Mrs. Rexford poured hot water from the kettle into a teapot.

“…like a hawk. Even now, she won’t trust Masako and me together,” Mrs. Kobayashi whispered.

“I still can’t believe Granny came.” Putting down the kettle, Mrs. Rexford wiped stray drops from the surface of the counter.

“Never let down your guard,” whispered Mrs. Kobayashi. “She’s aware of everything. Remember that.”

Mrs. Rexford mulled this over. “It’s so unlike Masako,” she said finally. “Usually she’s more careful. If she hadn’t stayed this long, Granny would never have come over in the first place.”

“It’s awkward,” agreed Mrs. Kobayashi.

Sarah, who all along had sensed some disturbing point outside her range of vision, felt a small thrill as it came into focus. The girls’ early arrival had been no accident. Mrs. Nishimura had wanted to come here; she had wanted to linger at this untidy breakfast table. Sarah recalled the guarded, apprehensive smiles of her grandmother and mother.

Now the two women fell silent.

“Hora…” Mrs. Kobayashi let out a sigh. “I had a feeling you should have gone there first. Didn’t I tell you? After this many years, you develop a sixth sense about these things.”

Noticing the girl’s presence for the first time, the women immediately switched to an animated discussion about the freshness of the tea cakes.

chapter 5

There was no chance to ask questions until late that night, when Sarah and her mother finally lay down on their futons.

They were side by side in the parlor. The walls were plastered with a mixture of fawn-colored clay and chopped straw. Like all traditional parlors it had a tokonoma, a built-in alcove of polished wood. Within it hung a long summer scroll with flowing black script. The scroll was the only object of pure white in the room, and it leapt out at the eye from inside the shadowed recess. At the foot of the alcove, in a shallow glazed bowl, Mrs. Kobayashi had arranged a single yellow lily from the garden, deliberately angled across long clean lines of summer grass.

Back in America, Sarah hadn’t remembered much about this room. But as soon as she arrived, everything had fitted seamlessly back into her memory, like the pigeon calls this morning. In fact when she first entered this room, she had immediately noticed that the stringed koto, which her mother had played in her youth and which stood in its original sheath of faded red silk, was now leaning against the tea cabinet wall instead of the tokonoma wall.

Sarah and her mother lay on their backs. Moonlight shone through a gap in the heavy drapes, which were slightly open to let in the breeze. For the first time that day, the house was utterly silent.

“When I was little,” said Mrs. Rexford, “there used to be a snake living up in the attic.”

“Ugh, a snake!” said Sarah. “Did you see it?”

“No. I just heard it at night, when I was lying in bed. The mouse would run-its nails went k’cha k’cha-then there was a quick dragging sound. After that, it got quiet again.”

“Weren’t you scared?” Sarah asked, even though she knew better. Her mother disapproved of timidity in any form.

“What for? Snakes bring good luck to households, remember? In the old days, farmers stored grain in the attic. Grain attracts mice, and mice attract snakes. So having a snake in your attic meant you were wealthy. During the occupation, I’d listen to that sound and feel safe, because the snake was protecting our black-market rice.”

“Black-market rice? In this attic?” Sarah strained her eyes in the moonlight. She could make out the shadowed, roughly hewn rafters of the ceiling, curiously out of sync with the polished gleam of the alcove and wall posts. The attic was silent. Never in her lifetime had Sarah heard any sound. But these were modern times after all, when nothing exciting ever happened.

She shifted her body to look over at her mother, and the buckwheat-husk pillow gave a loud crunch. Mrs. Rexford lay with her hands clasped behind her head. In the moonlight her face looked unformed and unfamiliar, framed by a cloud of hair loosened from its French twist.

They had never slept together in the same room before.

“Mama?” Sarah spoke softly, aware that these rooms were divided by nothing but paper panels. “How come things are awkward with Granny and Auntie?”

“Hmm?”

“I heard you talking in the kitchen.”

Mrs. Rexford gave a sigh of reluctance. Sarah waited patiently. Usually her questions were met with a brisk, “You’re still a child, it’s none of your business.” But this time-she felt sure-her mother would take her into her confidence as a form of damage control.

Sure enough, her mother whispered, “I suppose you’re old enough.” She switched to English. “But you’re not to tell Momoko or Yashiko-they don’t know yet. And don’t bother your grandmother.”

“Okay.”

“Your auntie Masako was adopted as a baby. The Asakis weren’t her real parents.”

“Oh. Then who were?”

“She and I have the same parents,” said Mrs. Rexford. “She’s my full sister by birth.”

“So Grandma’s her real mother…?” Sarah’s mind raced back over that morning. The tightness between her temples intensified as her brain realigned itself.

“That means your auntie is your true aunt. And Momoko and Yashiko are your true cousins.”

Sarah mulled this over. “Why did Grandma give her away?”

“She didn’t just give her away. It was more complicated than that.”

They were silent. Outside in the lane, a neighbor’s bicycle crunched slowly over the gravel.

“Here’s what you need to know. After your real grandfather died in the war, your grandmother was beholden to the Asakis. It was wartime and…things were complicated. She didn’t want to give up her baby, but she felt she had to. That’s it, basically.”

“But why-”

“No more questions.” Her mother switched back to Japanese. “We have to get some sleep.” Resigned, Sarah rolled onto her back and pulled the light summer comforter up to her chin. “Good night,” she said.

“Good night.”

She closed her eyes. Despite her exhaustion, she couldn’t shut down her brain. It was as if she’d been awake for so long, she had forgotten how. Inside her skull the echoes of Japanese voices chattered on and on, and would not stop.

After several minutes, her mother spoke again. “You mustn’t judge your grandmother. It was a difficult time.”

“I won’t.”

“In-family adoptions are actually an old tradition. In the villages, if you didn’t have children there was no one to take care of you in old age. So extended relatives had to help each other out. But they always kept the child inside the family. Japanese people never give away their babies to strangers.”

“Hmmm…”

“People still do it. Sometimes it’s to maintain the family line. That’s really important, you know, because family altar tablets have to be passed down from generation to generation. Or else rich families do it so they can pass down assets to a member of their clan.”

“Is that why-”

“No. Go to sleep.”

Mrs. Rexford soon drifted off. Sarah lay listening to her deep breathing.

If she had known of this adoption as a child, she probably would have thought nothing of it. Small children accepted everything as normal. After all, how was this any stranger than her grandmother marrying two brothers? Talk about keeping things within the family! Mrs. Kobayashi had married twice, the first Mr. Kobayashi for love and the second Mr. Kobayashi out of necessity. It had never occurred to the girl to find this curious. As a child, all she cared about was that her grandpa was related to her by blood, even though he wasn’t technically her grandfather.

Her thoughts drifted to the attic, silent now, emptied of snakes and black-market rice and the energy of a turbulent past. She thought of the war that polite people never mentioned-the war that had brought illegal rations into this house, caused her grandmother’s second marriage, and somehow contributed to her aunt’s adoption. In the shadowy rafters, the brutality of those times seemed to still linger.

chapter 6

After the formal visits of the first day, the two houses kept mostly to themselves. They did, however, drop by almost daily to share freshly cut flowers from their gardens, or an extra eel fillet bought on sale, or half of a designer melon received from a visitor. On certain evenings, Mrs. Kobayashi had Sarah walk over a platter of tempura or pot stickers, hot and crisp from the frying oil. These were greeted with great enthusiasm because-as Mrs. Kobayashi explained privately-the cooking over there was not so good. The Asaki household followed the old Kyoto tradition, using seasonings so subtle they were practically flavorless. (Mrs. Kobayashi, the Kobe native, went on to say that Kyoto people were notorious for donning beautiful silks in public but making do with substandard cuisine in private.) Sometimes Mrs. Asaki, laden down with shopping bags and beaming-she loved going downtown, where all the action was-tapped on the Kobayashis’ kitchen door on her way home and dropped off a French bakery bag filled with brioches and frankfurter pastries. But these exchanges lasted only a few minutes, and the women rarely took off their shoes and entered each other’s houses.

“How come we never sit around and talk, like we did the first day?” Sarah asked. Deep down, she knew why. But a childish part of her was disappointed, even petulant; she had been hoping for a constant round of social activity.

“Goodness, child. Who has the time! A house doesn’t just run itself,” said Mrs. Kobayashi, laughing.

Mrs. Rexford shot Sarah a glance of warning. “People need boundaries,” she said.

Luckily the children had no such restrictions. Sarah spent hours at the Asaki house. Within that household were two different worlds, one downstairs and one upstairs.

Downstairs was Mrs. Nishimura’s domain-not just during the day but also at night, when she and her husband rolled out their futons in the television room. Unlike the sunny rooms upstairs, the ground floor was tinged with restful green light from the garden. Since the formal dining room was used only for guests, the children gravitated toward the informal eating area that directly adjoined the kitchen. Under the large low table, stacked in tin boxes, were snacks: rice crackers wrapped in seaweed, shrimp crackers, curry-flavored puffs.

In the pale underwater light, Mrs. Nishimura glided in and out of the kitchen bearing delicate glass dishes of flan pudding, or salted rice balls, or crustless sandwich triangles garnished with parsley. “Hai, this is to wipe your fingers,” she told them, offering steaming-hot hand towels rolled into perfect tubes, just like the ones in restaurants. Her conversation was as soft and serene as the leaf-filtered light. “Do you like juice?” she would ask gently, as if Sarah were still seven or eight instead of fourteen. She made conversation by saying things like, “Yashiko’s favorite spoons have Hello Kitty on them, don’t they, Yashiko?”

Sarah sometimes wondered if her aunt switched personas as soon as she was alone with her own children, dropping her outside face and talking in rapid, droll sentences like everyone else. She watched carefully when her aunt was in the company of other women. Although Mrs. Nishimura did switch to an adult-level vocabulary, her demeanor remained as soft and ethereal as with the children. She lacked the impulsive, gossipy spark that the other women seemed to share in abundance. Once, in a private uncharitable moment, Mrs. Rexford sighed sharply to her mother, “I swear! She’s like a blancmange pudding.”

Then Mrs. Rexford had immediately rectified her blunder (“Because blancmange pudding is pure and white, never sullied by anything ugly”) to ensure that there would be no true understanding on her daughter’s part.

“It’s okay, Mama, I know,” said Sarah. “She’s sort of like a Christian Madonna, isn’t she.”

Mrs. Rexford’s relieved eyes met hers. “Exactly,” she said.

It wasn’t as if the two sisters disliked each other. Mrs. Rexford was protective of Mrs. Nishimura, who in turn looked up to her big sister with sincere admiration. But they weren’t everyday friends, the way Mrs. Rexford was with their mother.

When the girls tired of playing downstairs, they climbed up to the second story, where the tatami mats were warm from the sunlight flooding in through the glass wall panels. Sometimes they slid shut the latticed shoji screens against the midday glare. Then a soft, diffused light glowed through the rice paper and created a lovely effect, as if they were living inside a giant paper lantern.

The girls’ room wasn’t a true “room” in the Western sense, since the entire second floor was one enormous room. In place of solid dividing walls, there were fusuma: wall-to-wall partitions of sliding doors that were left open during the day and slid shut at night. These doors were covered on both sides with thick, durable paper whose fibrous surface was interwoven with what looked like delicate strands of green seaweed.

Momoko and Yashiko’s side looked out over the back garden. Much of the view was obscured by the leafy branches of a huge persimmon tree. But Mrs. Asaki’s side, which faced the gravel lane, had a striking panoramic view. Sarah loved standing on her great-aunt’s balcony and gazing out over the tiled triangular roofs: some slate gray, others gray-blue, all sprouting television antennae like feathery weeds. Every so often, this somber expanse was interrupted by the imposing black sweep of a temple roof or the bright vermilion of a tall shrine gate. In the distance, against the green backdrop of the Kyoto hills, a cluster of tall commercial buildings rose up through the summer haze.

From this vantage point she could also look down directly into her grandmother’s garden, as Mrs. Asaki had done that first morning. It gave Sarah an uneasy thrill to realize how clearly visible everything was from here, right down to the pink comic book she had left outside on the veranda. Once Sarah saw her mother and grandmother outside in the garden, crouching side by side near the lilies and pointing excitedly at something in the dirt. She waved but they didn’t see her.

This view reinforced her feeling that the Asaki house was somehow incomplete, in spite of its large size and pleasant rooms. Its soul seemed to look out toward the Kobayashi house instead of inward unto itself. Of course, that might have been her imagination. But Momoko and Yashiko seemed to feel it too. “Big Sister, can we go play at your house now?” one of them invariably asked. Sarah would have preferred to stay. She liked the novelty of an unfamiliar household, and her aunt served frequent snacks. But she yielded to her cousins, whose mute urgency was like that of dogs straining at a leash. She felt, in some strange way, that she owed it to them.

“Don’t stay too long and become a bother,” Mrs. Nishimura called gently from the doorway, waving after her children, who had already broken into a run. And Sarah, lingering behind to return her aunt’s wave, felt once again that odd compunction.

There wasn’t much to play with at the Kobayashi house. It had none of the Asaki house’s amenities: no colored pencils or origami, no finches in hanging cages on the balcony, no ancient turtles floating in mossy stone vats. But when the girls stepped up into the kitchen vestibule and saw Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Rexford doubled up with laughter over their tea or spiritedly gossiping in the kitchen as they chopped vegetables for the evening meal, they always felt they had arrived at the true center of things.

“They sure do love to come here,” Sarah remarked one day after her cousins had gone home. She had spent the last half hour watching them dart between her mother and grandmother, tugging on the women’s sleeves and crying, “Aunt Mama, Aunt Mama, guess what?” and “Look, Granny Kobayashi! Look what I got.”

“Why do they need your attention?” she asked her grandmother irritably. “They see you all the time. They live right here.”

“They’re only allowed to come over when you’re visiting,” Mrs. Kobayashi said.

Sarah opened her mouth, but her mother silenced her with a look.

During these early days, the girl observed many things. She saw that her grandmother never approached the Asaki house, not even to drop off flowers or food (the exception was formal holidays such as New Year’s or O-bon, when both families dined together). She saw that her grandmother never chatted for very long with Mrs. Nishimura unless Mrs. Asaki was also present. Mrs. Kobayashi showed a similar, though lesser, restraint around Momoko and Yashiko, which disappeared if they were all in a group.

But everyone else interacted freely. Mrs. Asaki came visiting-alone, without her daughter-on the pretext of paying respects to her ancestors’ family altar. She lingered afterward for a jolly gossip over tea and slices of red-bean jelly. And Mrs. Rexford had once stayed at the Asaki house for several hours, calling Mrs. Asaki “Auntie” and drinking beer with Mr. Nishimura, although she generally refrained from such visits out of loyalty to her mother.

Sarah wondered if Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Asaki had set up these boundaries right from the start. Perhaps they had silently evolved over the decades. If that first morning was any indication, there must have been slip-ups. For how could such an arrangement not foster, on either side, countless small moments of sorrow and resentment?

chapter 7

There was an old saying: a well-bred woman thinks several steps ahead. “It’s like playing chess, ne,” Mrs. Rexford explained to her daughter. “Before you make a move, you have to consider all possible consequences.”

Usually the women’s strategies were simple. If Mrs. Kobayashi or Mrs. Rexford realized they were laughing too loudly, one of them might utter “Shh…” and jerk her head in the direction of the Asaki house.

Or they might say to Sarah, “Let’s not mention that we went out for sushi without them, ne? It’s just easier.”

“Why would they even care?” Sarah asked. “They do things without us, and we don’t mind.” Her elders merely looked at her with weary patience.

One day, to Sarah’s delight, the women announced they were taking her downtown for an afternoon of shopping. It was then that she learned how complex forward-thinking could be.

“Should I run over right now and invite Momoko and Yashiko?” Mrs. Asaki always invited her along when she took her granddaughters shopping. They had ice cream on the sixteenth floor of the Takashimaya department store, and they were allowed one item each from the Hello Kitty shop.

“Soh soh, run along and invite them,” urged her grandfather, who happened to be passing by on his way to the workroom. He carried a sheaf of sketches and his hair was rumpled. He was preparing for an upcoming jewelry exhibition.

Mrs. Kobayashi waited until he passed, then shook her head at Sarah. “Don’t listen,” she whispered. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” The two women exchanged wry smiles of exasperation.

“You mean they can’t come?” Momoko and Yashiko adored the French pastry shops and the department stores that lined Marutamachi Boulevard.

“It would be best if you didn’t mention it,” her grandmother said.

Sarah pouted as she and her mother stood in the parlor, changing into their downtown clothes. “Grandma’s stingy,” she complained.

Mrs. Rexford laughed. When the three of them reconvened in the family room, she told her mother, “We need to educate this child. She thinks you’re being stingy.”

“Ara maa.” Mrs. Kobayashi smiled indulgently.

Mrs. Rexford took to her task right away. “Now use your chess brain,” she told Sarah as the three of them put on their shoes in the vestibule. “What would happen if you invited the girls?”

“They’d be allowed to come. Granny and Auntie would say it was a lovely idea.”

“You’re absolutely right. They’d certainly say that.”

Mother and daughter stepped out into the lane and watched as Mrs. Kobayashi drew the curtains behind the glass panels of the kitchen door. She then rolled the door shut and locked it, even though Mr. Kobayashi was still inside.

“Let’s go this way,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. They headed toward the paved street, avoiding the gravel lane that passed right under Mrs. Asaki’s balcony. Their corner house was convenient for sleight-of-hand exits. The view from the Asaki house covered only the Kobayashis’ formal guest entrance, not the kitchen entrance around the corner.

“So if they came with us, what would happen?” quizzed Mrs. Rexford.

Sarah had no idea. She had never been good at chess.

“Don’t you think Granny Asaki would feel bad,” her mother said, “sitting at home while her grandchildren were out having a good time with their real grandmother?”

Sarah darted a quick glance at her grandmother. So she knew that Sarah knew!

“Would Granny feel bad?” Sarah asked doubtfully.

“Of course! She’s very insecure.”

Before turning the corner onto the main street, they paused. Mrs. Rexford peeked around the wooden fence. Ahead of them was the neighborhood snack shop whose owner, chatty Mrs. Yagi, was usually outside gossiping with a customer. “She’s not there. Quick,” Mrs. Rexford said, and the three of them strode briskly past in their telltale clothes: Sarah in her good dress, the women in their heels.

They relaxed when they entered the long, tree-lined stretch of Ginnan Street, where the crosstown bus stop was.

“So if Granny feels insecure and frustrated”-Mrs. Rexford was slightly out of breath-“then what happens? She takes it out on-whom?”

“Nnn…Uncle?” Sarah knew something about the in-law situation; her parents had discussed it. Things were a bit strained because the mother-in-law, not the son-in-law, owned the deed to the house. In theory it made perfect sense to take in a son-in-law and his family-the house was too big for a widow living alone. But there was something emasculating about it. And apparently Mrs. Asaki was not above taking subtle advantage of the situation.

“Very good,” said Mrs. Rexford. “Then what would happen?”

“There’s more?”

“This is really not that hard,” her mother said. “Use your brain. If the harmony of their house is disturbed, who has to act as go-between and calm everyone down?”

“That would be your auntie,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “And a thankless task it is,” she added grimly.

“So then you’d have three adults upset and troubled, all because you didn’t think ahead. Is that what you want?”

“No! I don’t want that.”

“Then as strange as it may seem,” concluded her mother, “slipping out like this is actually the best solution.”

“Very true,” said Mrs. Kobayashi.

For Sarah, this was an unfamiliar way of thinking. It was exciting but also exhausting, like that playground game where balls came at you from every direction. Despite the good intentions, it struck her as vaguely distasteful. The Asaki household would be shocked and hurt if they knew how much strategy lay behind her grandmother’s and mother’s actions…or would they? Apparently large families were much more complex than Sarah had imagined. Those big, jolly families she read about in children’s books, the kind that stood around the Christmas tree holding hands and singing, never seemed to face these kinds of issues.

“Are they really that sensitive?” she asked her grandmother later that day. “Do you really think we have to be this careful?” She had waited to catch her grandmother alone, because she feared her mother would tell her to mind her own business.

“Saa…,” Mrs. Kobayashi replied, “it’s better to be safe than sorry, don’t you think?”

“Are all Japanese families like this?”

“Probably not,” her grandmother said.

chapter 8

Normally Sarah and her mother and grandmother walked to the open-air market together, but one morning Mrs. Kobayashi stayed behind. She was cooking a big pot of curry while the day was still cool.

“What I’ll do is divide this into packets and put them in the freezer,” she told Mrs. Rexford. “That way, we can heat them up anytime we’re in a rush.” She demonstrated by crouching down and pulling open the door of the icebox, which was barely half the size of the Rexfords’ freezer back home. Women in the Ueno neighborhood didn’t need much storage space, since they bought fresh fish and produce every day. “See?” Mrs. Kobayashi revealed a tiny freezer compartment crammed with small, shrink-wrapped lumps and squares. “Look, I even froze the potato croquettes. Plus that filet mignon Sarah didn’t finish-actually we could chop that up today, don’t you think, and use it in fried rice?”

Sarah and her mother now strolled through the narrow lanes toward the open-air market. Mornings in this part of the neighborhood were always heavy with silence, except for those brief periods when clusters of children tramped to Tai Chi Hour or summer school meetings. Dark wooden houses rose up on either side, somber and shrinelike. Up in the trees, cicadas shrilled and shimmered, their unrelieved drone intensifying the silence instead of lessening it. Walking through this noise was like walking through the very heart of summer.

For a while, neither said a word. They hadn’t been alone together in the daytime since…probably since America.

They passed old-fashioned houses similar to the Kobayashis’. One had a charming trellis fence made of bamboo poles, whose deep golden hue contrasted nicely with the black twine knotting them together. Tall shrubbery from the garden poked out through the square openings, creating a nice textural effect while protecting the occupants’ privacy. Many of these fences were deliberately rustic, homages to country dwellings of the past. Sarah’s favorite was a fence that looked like a solid wall of dried twigs, cleverly held in place by slender crosspieces. But she also admired one of its neighbors that stood farther down the lane. It was a large property, with the slightly forbidding air of a yashiki manor. The fence consisted of a low foundation of boulders that was reminiscent of the stone bases of imperial castles. From these stones rose a solid, dun-colored wall of mud plaster, topped by a miniature rooftop of gray tiles. Above it, only the tops of the trees within were visible.

“I used to come and play here all the time,” Mrs. Rexford said, trailing her fingers along the mud wall. And Sarah marveled that none of this held any mystery for her mother.

They reached Umeya Shrine and cut through its grounds toward Tenjin Boulevard. Umeya was a tiny neighborhood shrine, well below the radar of those official tour buses that rumbled in and out of the So-Zen Temple complex several blocks away. The grounds here were deserted, the white expanse of raked sand emphasizing the gravity of the dark, moss-stained structures lining its periphery.

This was where Sarah and her cousins came each morning, before breakfast, to do tai chi exercises. They were joined by other neighborhood children, as well as old people who no longer needed to go to work or prepare breakfast for their families. At first, the children had stared at Sarah. But by now they had grown used to her presence, although there were still some who sneaked glances when they thought she wasn’t looking. Momoko and Yashiko didn’t seem to mind being seen with her; they acted nonchalant, as if they hosted Western visitors all year round.

Today a young mother stood in the open space, tossing out bread crumbs to a half circle of pigeons and urging her toddler to do the same. The little boy clutched a fistful of his mother’s skirt and gazed distrustfully at the bobbing, pecking birds. “Hato po’po…,” the woman sang softly, trying to encourage him with an old-fashioned ditty about feeding pigeons in the temple.

“Do you remember that song?” asked Mrs. Rexford. “I used to sing it to you when you were little.”

“I remember,” Sarah said. It seemed a lifetime ago. It was unsettling to hear this strange young woman singing it. She remembered a time when her own mother’s voice had held such unguarded tenderness, and sharp sorrow slipped through her belly.

They walked on, passing a stone statue of a fox deity, and entered the shade of a row of maple trees. “Granny Asaki says that starting in October, it’ll be against the law to feed pigeons,” Sarah said. “She says their droppings are ruining all the wood.”

“Did she? Well, it was bound to happen,” said Mrs. Rexford, “with so many tourists nowadays. But it’ll be strange, won’t it, not having them around anymore.”

Within these cloistered grounds, they sensed the busy, noisy world lying in wait just beyond. Somewhere behind one of the shrine buildings, someone hammered, paused, then began hammering again. At the other end of the grounds, in the gap framed by massive vermilion gateposts, cars and buses flashed by with a muted whizzing.

Mrs. Rexford halted in the shade of the maple trees. Lowering her parasol, she lifted her face toward the leaf-laden branches.

“Look, Sarah,” she said, pointing up. “You see how the sunlight’s coming down through these leaves?” She had a tendency to lecture when she felt deeply moved. “This is exactly the way it used to look when I was a child. The exact same way.” She kept on pointing, as if determined to press these unremarkable trees onto her daughter’s memory.

“Oh,” said Sarah.

Mrs. Rexford raised her parasol, and they walked on.

Once Sarah had read a poem about “a lifetime caught in a fall of light,” or perhaps it was “a century caught in a fall of light.” She remembered nothing else about the poem, just that phrase, which rose up from nowhere to claim the moment.

She pictured her mother hunting for cicadas as a child, perhaps in these very trees: a tomboy with a bamboo pole, squinting up with determination through the knife-edged glints of light flashing through the leaves. She pictured her mother in later years, reading and sketching outdoors. There must have been moments when she paused in her work to look up at just such a canopy of tiny, star-shaped leaves, their green made translucent by the sun. She thought, too, of an anecdote her grandmother had told: when Sarah was a baby, her mother had held her up to a tree branch, then laughed and laughed with delight when her child reached out and curled her tiny fingers around a low-hanging leaf.

How did it feel to be her mother, to look up at a tree and be transported back to all those previous lives? Was it like hearing pigeons in the morning? Caught…in a fall of light… Something unfamiliar stirred in the girl: an inarticulate feeling, diffuse and layered like the groundswell of an orchestra. She knew it was an adult emotion, one caused by the passage of time.

They reached the vermilion gateposts and descended the shallow stone steps to the sidewalk, where floating dust motes vanished in the direct sunlight. As if in response to this abrupt change in atmosphere, Mrs. Rexford switched to English. “Okay, which route should we take?” she said briskly. “The weavers’ alley? Or So-Zen Temple?”

The magic spell was broken. “The weavers’ alley,” Sarah replied, switching the conversation back to Japanese with a hint of her old asperity. It annoyed her when her mother used English for no good reason. Sarah had once asked her to speak nothing but Japanese while they were here, only to be told, “Sometimes English is more efficient.” She was too embarrassed to insist, for it was true there were gaps in her Japanese. She certainly couldn’t say, “I feel more loved when you use Japanese. Your voice becomes warmer…” Nor could she admit how much of an outsider it made her feel, having to use a different language from the others.

In her own youth, Yoko Kobayashi had taken quiet pride in standing out from the masses. She sported a sleek, traditionally cut bob while other young women were frazzling their hair with Western-style permanent waves. Having no shortage of male admirers, she considered herself exempt from girlish affectations such as covering her mouth when she laughed. As a badge of distinction, she liked to wear something unusual but not ostentatious-a man’s muffler, or an outré piece of jewelry designed by her stepfather-catching in people’s eyes that flash of respect. Years later in Fielder’s Butte, she took a perverse pleasure in wielding her parasol with poise as she walked past the apartment pool where American women slathered in baby oil lay baking their bodies in halter tops and short jean cutoffs. Although these American eyes met hers with curiosity, condescension, or blank dismissal, there was a fleeting instant when they assessed her neckline and slender figure with the universal glint of female rivalry. She knew they noticed her skin, which was exceptionally smooth, with a porcelain sheen that had attracted attention all her life.

Where, then, did her daughter get her timidity?

Not from her husband. John Rexford was fifty-seven, his wife’s senior by eighteen years. Formerly a physicist, he had taken early retirement in order to “read and think.” He admitted this humbly, almost sheepishly. Mrs. Rexford admired his modesty. She bragged to Sarah on his behalf, explaining in detail all she knew of his professional accomplishments, of his wide range of knowledge and interests.

But the mere fact of her husband’s modesty wasn’t what held her interest. It was what she sensed behind it: a genuine lack of need for public approval. Mrs. Rexford, who secretly struggled to reconcile what she had been with what she was now, envied his strength of mind. Her husband, like her, had tossed away the crutch of social position. But unlike her, he didn’t seem to feel its loss. It helped, of course, that he was living in his native country. But even when they were living in Japan, he had stayed remarkably, transcendently unchanged. “You’re hardly human!” she had cried during one of their rare fights. She was constantly trying, and failing, to emulate her husband. Her devotion to him was fueled by this enormous respect.

And yet Mr. Rexford was charming to the townsfolk, full of dry wit and a seasoned grace of manner. (Mrs. Kobayashi had once remarked that he put her in mind of those gentlemen in Sherlock Holmes movies. Having grown up near the cosmopolitan port of Kobe, she had always been something of an Anglophile.) Mrs. Rexford was fascinated by this social side of him, this flashback from a former life that excluded her.

Fielder’s Butte was a small logging town, hours away from any major city. It was an ideal place for living within the tight budget imposed by Mr. Rexford’s early retirement. Mrs. Rexford enjoyed the creative challenge of making do within monetary limits. Sometimes, though, she felt a keen loss for their social identities, not just her own but her husband’s too. But in its place was a life more free and elemental than any she had ever known. It was no coincidence they both loved Thoreau’s Walden.

When Sarah was small and they still lived in the Kyoto hills, Mrs. Rexford had tried to instill in her child something of this mental strength. “Stand up tall,” she said. “Lift up your chin…like I taught you, like this. Then the boys won’t bully you.” She had even cut her daughter’s hair short, striving for a jaunty, non-vulnerable look. But it was all in vain. Even after they moved to America, Sarah said things like, “Mother, I can’t wear those pants. They’re not what the other girls are wearing.” Or, “Why can’t we eat dinner at Burger King? The other families are all doing it.”

It wasn’t that Mrs. Rexford couldn’t sympathize. She, too, remembered the shame of not fitting in. Once in middle school, some girls in her class had made a snide remark about her wearing the same sweater year after year. It was true: each summer, Mrs. Kobayashi would unravel the yarn and reknit it, adding new stripes in different-colored yarn to accommodate her daughter’s growing body. Hearing the girls’ words, young Yoko had felt a deep stab of humiliation. She had resolved, on the spot, to demand a new sweater the minute she got home.

But when she remembered her mother knitting late into the night, sweating in the summer humidity, so lovingly and carefully holding the sweater up against Yoko’s chest for measurements, a surge of pity and then fury had made her lift her eyes to those girls and say, with a careless smile, “Saa-what can I say? Some mothers go to a lot of trouble for their children. That’s how you know if they really love you.”

“I guess our mothers show love in different ways,” sneered one girl.

“Yes, I’ve noticed that,” said Yoko. “I’ve noticed who brings the fewest side dishes in her lunch box. I’ve noticed whose mother isn’t at the Temple of Wisdom, praying for her child, the evening before an exam. So when certain people talk big, they’re not fooling me.” And her knowing smirk had brought a flicker of anxiety to the aggressor’s eyes.

Why couldn’t Sarah, just once, stand up for her like that?

Mrs. Rexford felt a keen, wretched misery. Her daughter did not love her the way she loved her own mother. Mrs. Rexford had doted on Sarah with the same passion and focus that her own mother had lavished on her, but the results, like everything else she tried in America, had come out slightly skewed. “Can’t you think for yourself?” she would snap at her daughter. “Is everyone worth imitating except your own mother?” And that was how their fighting would begin.

chapter 9

The open-air market was at the height of activity. As usual on a Monday, housewives were out in full force. Parked bicycles cluttered the sidewalks, forcing the shoppers out into the street, where they wove in and out among the slow-moving cars. A small crowd was stooped over the fish market display. Now that the rainy season had passed, dispelling worries about food poisoning and mold, a large selection of raw fish had been set out on crushed ice. Thin wooden tablets, stuck upright into the ice, displayed prices written in black brushstrokes. On the pavement stood a row of blue plastic buckets, in which live fish moved in slow circles.

“Ladies!” called a middle-aged fishmonger from behind the counter, his eyes locked on the mackerel he was speedily filleting. “Haai-welcome! How about some nice chilled sashimi slices? Take a little home for lunch!” He cast his voice out over the street in controlled, far-reaching arcs of sound, as a fisherman flings out his nets. Its reverberation reminded Sarah of the So-Zen priests who came chanting each morning.

A young man working beside him, probably his son, chimed in. “Baby octopus! Cockles for clear soup! Everything fresh fresh fresh!” His energetic bellowing made up in volume what it lacked of his father’s practiced resonance. At the far end of the counter, a woman in a white frilled apron stood over an open grill of eel fillets, using two battered cardboard uchiwa to fan the fragrant smoke out toward prospective buyers. The provocative aroma of glazed soy sauce and sugar hung in the air and made Sarah’s mouth water, even though she had just eaten breakfast.

The housewives succeeded each other with quick, efficient footsteps that were at odds with their peaceful expressions. Mrs. Rexford wove through the crowd with nimble expertise, not bothering to look back. Sarah lurched after her mother, clutching her wicker basket and string bag and trying to avoid the sharp points of the women’s parasols.

The produce booths were crowded too. Sarah’s mother and grandmother usually made her wait on the sidewalk while they darted in to make fast, efficient transactions. Huge bundles of freshly picked edamame boughs were piled high on tables, the hairy pods still attached to the branches. Small green yuzu, or citrons, were in season but expensive. All booths featured carrots that were bright red instead of orange, a variety native to the Kyoto area. There were seedless kyuuri cucumbers, delicious when sliced and dipped in a mixture of Worcestershire sauce and sweet Japanese mayonnaise. “Let’s get some of those!” Sarah suggested.

“Do you hear that jingling?” asked Mrs. Rexford as they walked toward the pickle shop. “Isn’t it pretty?” The sound of countless tiny bells pervaded the street. It came from the stall owners’ money bags, which hung overhead from rubber cords. Working the abacus with one hand, a vendor would pull down the bag with his free hand when he wanted to withdraw or deposit loose change. Omamori-religious charms with little bells attached, sold at local temples and shrines-hung from each money bag. When the vendor released his bag after a transaction, it bounced up on its rubber cord, and the omamori bells-as well as the coins within-continued jingling for a minute or so until the bag stopped moving.

“It is pretty!” said Sarah.

“People call that the sound of prosperous commerce.”

After the street bustle it was a relief to enter the cool, restful shade of the pickle store. The pickle store wasn’t a stall like the others, but an extension of a private home. When the proprietor emerged from the back of the store to serve them, they caught a momentary glimpse of tatami mats and white floor cushions through the open sliding door. There was a timeless, prewar quality about this place, due to the blackened wall boards and the wooden shipping barrels stacked against them.

“Welcome back, miss,” the proprietor greeted Sarah. He was an elderly man with a thin strip of white cotton tied around his head, the traditional sign of a man ready and eager to work. “Remember how you used to stick your hand in the pickles when you were a little girl, before your mother could stop you?” Sarah giggled, embarrassed but also pleased that he had remembered. To hide her sudden shyness, she leaned over to inspect the lacquered display boxes. They held a large array of pickled items: long fat daikon radishes, cucumbers, scallions, lotus roots, Japanese eggplant, gourds, greens, seaweed. They lay limply within various fermented pastes, whose pungent aroma stirred up in Sarah some memory from her early childhood that fell just short of definition.

“Pickles are Kyoto ’s most famous commodity,” Mrs. Rexford informed her daughter, primarily for the shopkeeper’s benefit. “They’re a cultural treasure, you know, with all the subtleties of wine. Visitors from other cities always stock up on these to take home as gifts.” Sarah had received similar “lessons” in the presence of other vendors, for her mother and grandmother were skilled in the subtle flattery that resulted in spontaneous markdowns.

The proprietor beamed as he scooped up Mrs. Rexford’s order: sweet red pickle relish to serve with the curry Mrs. Kobayashi was making. “You both look very cosmopolitan today!” he said admiringly. “Simple elegance-now that’s what I like!” He too was good at flattery. But it was true that Mrs. Rexford and her daughter made a striking pair.

Mrs. Rexford wore a new blouse of lipstick red. Few other women could have carried off such an intense color. Sarah wore a wide-brimmed straw hat with a big green ribbon tied off-center beneath her chin. The green of the ribbon brought out the green-gray tints of her eyes. Naturally, Mrs. Rexford had chosen it. The girl hadn’t resisted. She had no clue as to what was acceptable in this country, and she trusted her mother’s judgment here as she did not in America. Yielding to her mother had filled her with a surprising rush of happiness.

During the course of their shopping, they ran into several acquaintances.

“I see you all the time with your mother,” one woman told Mrs. Rexford. “But I can never bring myself to intrude…you always look so close and intimate…”

“You’re far too polite!” scolded Mrs. Rexford.

“It’s so touching,” the woman continued wistfully, “to see the way you scrub each other’s backs at the bathhouse.”

Some women from the weaving class, whom Mrs. Kobayashi would have regarded with some social reserve, took this opportunity to draw near and chat.

“Do you live in San-Fran City?” they asked admiringly, looking them both over. “Do you wear trousers?” “Your girl’s grown so big…so pretty…”

With a wide American smile, Mrs. Rexford chatted back.

Sarah watched and listened in silence. Among American women back home, her mother would have been the picture of Oriental demureness. Her attitude was one of wide-eyed fascination: “How smart and funny you are!” Privately, Mrs. Rexford considered the Fielder’s Butte women her intellectual inferiors, and had the playing field been level, she would have considered them her social inferiors as well. So her stories at home, while observant and witty, were not always kind. But some American women were flattered and charmed. Nurturing instincts aroused, they went out of their way to offer tutelage and protection. “Honey, your mama’s a real doll!” they would tell Sarah, handing her recipes for potato chip casseroles and Jell-O molds. “Give this to your mama, I know she’ll enjoy it. She’s an absolute sweetheart, such an adorable little Chinese lady!”

Mrs. Rexford now stood in the crowded market, her red blouse like a flame attracting the pale, mothlike shades of the local women’s dresses. This flamelike quality was also in her face. Watching her, Sarah felt that same deep joy as when her mother had picked out her hat.

Their final encounter was at the poultry stall. They approached two other customers who were standing under the red-and-white-striped awning, peering down at a straw-lined display of eggs in various sizes and colors. “Auntie Sasaki!” Mrs. Rexford called out to one of them, in the breezy voice that came so easily to her in this country. “What dish are you going to make with those eggs?” The elderly woman turned around to see who had spoken. Her face brightened with pleasure, and they fell immediately into conversation.

“Just look at you, Yo-chan,” the woman said at one point, patting Mrs. Rexford’s shoulder in the overfamiliar manner of the weaving class. “I bet you’re the queen bee over in America too, aren’t you? Just like you were here. Oh yes, I know you are-don’t deny it! Anta, I’m very perceptive! I can tell, just from looking at your face.”

“Oh, please!” Mrs. Rexford protested, laughing. She dismissed the compliment with a languid wave of her hand, as she had been doing all morning. But this woman’s bluntness caused a frisson of awkwardness to pass between mother and daughter. For Sarah knew what no one, not even her grandmother, fully understood: the truth of how things were in America.

“Is it true you once beat up a bully?” asked the second customer, a vacant-looking young woman in her twenties.

“Oh yes!” said the old woman. “That’s a true story. I know, because it was my very own boy that was being picked on.”

“Once a success, always a success,” chimed in the poultry vendor, who had come over with some fresh boxes from the back. “You’ve done us proud.” The little group beamed at Mrs. Rexford, their eyes shiny with approval.

On that note, they headed home. They passed a small tea shop, the last outpost before the street turned residential. Inside the display window was an assortment of skewered summer dumplings arranged on lacquered trays.

Sarah glanced at her mother. There was a pleased flush on Mrs. Rexford’s cheeks, a glint in her eye, as if she had just come away from a party held in her honor. She caught her daughter’s eye, then looked away.

“I guess the shopping took a little longer than usual,” she said. She said this with a sheepish kind of dignity, and Sarah felt a rush of pity. Or maybe it was guilt: she, with her petty teenage cruelties, had been responsible for many of her mother’s difficulties in America.

“Did it?” Sarah said gently. “I didn’t notice.” They walked on in silence.

The last time she had felt this sort of pain for her mother-the kind that made her stomach feel sick-had been almost a year ago. Mrs. Rexford had made German coleslaw for Sarah to bring to her school potluck: an authentic recipe with caraway seeds and vinegar. Hardly anyone at school had touched it, preferring the more familiar mayonnaise-covered potato salad. On her way home, Sarah had dumped the uneaten remains in the grass. Her mother, greeting her at the door, had seen the empty serving dish and cried, “Why, they ate it all!” and her happy expression had haunted Sarah for days.

What did it matter, she now asked herself fiercely, if her mother wasn’t a queen bee on both continents? How many people were that lucky?

Sarah herself had never been a queen bee anywhere. But these days her status was rising. The neighbors’ admiration and affection for her mother flowed over onto her with little distinction between them. Even in her own family, Sarah belonged-if only partially-to her grandmother’s inner circle, for no other reason than lineage.

Even though she knew she was merely basking in her mother’s glory, the effect was heady. It was like the time when she was a little girl and her grandfather had carried her on his feet while dancing a waltz. In that moment she had understood, for the first time, how it felt to move through space with elegance and authority. “Soh soh, that’s right,” her grandfather had chuckled. “Soh soh, see? Your body knows it.”

Lately there were moments when Sarah found herself gliding through daily life with uncharacteristic confidence and entitlement, just like her mother. It was surprising how easy it was, how natural and right it felt. During such moments she felt a glimmer of hope that her true personality had been in hiding all these years, just as her mother’s had been, and the whole world was opening up before her.

chapter 10

They were halfway home when they met Mrs. Nishimura coming from the opposite direction. She held a parasol of pale blue linen in one hand and a woven straw basket in the other. The three stopped in pleased recognition. “You both look so nice!” Mrs. Nishimura said.

“So do you, Auntie,” said Sarah. Her aunt wore soft pink lipstick and a sundress of the same general shade as her parasol. Under the blue-tinted shade her face looked delicate, almost translucent.

“Ma-chan!” exclaimed Mrs. Rexford, her eyes still animated from the marketplace encounters. “Listen: go to Hachi-ya as soon as you get there. They’re having a sale on prayer incense-the good kind. And it’s going fast.”

“Really? Good thing you told me. We’re almost out.”

As they stood chatting in the street, Sarah became aware of a problem. Inside her string bag, clearly visible if anyone glanced down, was a box of cream puffs. It had been laid right on top so as not to get squashed, and it was wrapped in the distinctive blue paper of Ushigome Confectionery.

The problem consisted of several parts. On a simple level, Mrs. Rexford hadn’t bought enough to share with the Asaki household. If her aunt knew about the cream puffs, she and the girls might expect to receive some that evening.

On a more complex level, Ushigome Confectionery was far more expensive than the store where they had bought the Nishimuras’ cake on the first day. No expense was being spared for the Rexfords’ visit-the best cuts of meat, the most expensive fish, gourmet-quality desserts. Mrs. Nishimura, who was Mrs. Kobayashi’s daughter too, had never had any such fuss made over her. Of course there were logical reasons for this. But there was a fundamental inequality here, one that mustn’t be flaunted. Imitating the sleight of hand she had observed in her elders, Sarah casually shifted the basket behind her back.

Her mother shot her a look of approval.

That glance, coming on the heels of Sarah’s remorse for her mother, triggered in her a burst of happiness.

Later, she would look back on this moment as one of the turning points of the summer. For it was the first time she had actively colluded against her aunt. Even in her happiness she was aware of crossing an invisible line of allegiance, leaving her auntie on the other side.

The lane that passed through the weavers’ neighborhood was narrower than the lanes at home and covered with asphalt instead of loose gravel. Although seemingly deserted, it resounded with the gat-tan, gat-tan of wooden looms from the houses on either side. These were the poorer dwellings, lacking the buffer of gateways or garden entrances. They were packed so closely together that they gave the impression of being one continuous building, broken up only by individual roofs.

When Sarah and her mother passed the open windows, many of which were lightly barred with old-fashioned bamboo, the general clatter resolved itself into individual rhythms. In one house, it was slow and uneven. In the next house, the pace was fast and furious; someone was probably speeding through an unpatterned section. This lane was extremely narrow, almost claustrophobic with so much noise and so many miniature potted plants lined beside each door. The two of them, walking abreast, took up its entire width.

Then Sarah felt her mother’s hand slip into hers.

She stared straight ahead, unable to look. Her mother’s hand was warm and slightly calloused, and it held hers with the close, familiar grip she remembered from childhood. Sarah thought of the woman in the shrine, singing to her toddler in that tender voice. A strange burning started in her eyes, a slow treacherous swell in her throat. She widened her eyes so that no tears would spill.

They walked hand in hand through the cacophony of the looms. A straggle of wild grass, still lush from the rainy season, had pushed up through a crack in the asphalt. Its detail refracted sharp and clear through the moisture in her eyes.

“This little lane,” said her mother, “is the best barometer of Japan ’s economy. I tell you, it’s so accurate you don’t even need a newspaper.” She said this nonchalantly, as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening.

“Ng,” said Sarah.

“Think about it,” Mrs. Rexford continued. “When women have extra spending money, what’s the first thing they do? They show off to their neighbors. They attend expensive tea ceremonies. They send their daughters for lessons in koto or classical dance. And what do all these activities require? That’s right, kimonos and sashes. And who weaves the silk? People like these.”

“So this noise means Japan ’s really prosperous right now?” Sarah thought of the bells attached to the vendors’ money bags: the sound of prosperous commerce.

“Soh. The stock market and the looms move together. Every time. Remember that.”

Noon was approaching, and it was hotter than when they had first set out. Their clasped hands became damp with perspiration. Even Sarah’s bare arms felt moist. But she preferred this wet heat to the dry desert air of Fielder’s Butte, where the harsh, undiluted rays burned the skin. She felt loose and open to the world.

The heat had caused one of the houses to leave its sliding door slightly open, in hopes of catching a breeze. From within, mixed with the looms’ clatter, came a television’s tinny sounds of applause and merriment. Above the tiled roofs white clouds were shining, like explosions of giant popcorn. Happiness, like those clouds, hung just within their reach.

chapter 11

“Don’t forget,” announced Mrs. Kobayashi, descending into the kitchen. “Granny Asaki’s coming over after lunch to pay her respects to the altar.”

“I’ll put some new flowers in the altar vase,” said Mrs. Rexford. She stepped up into the dining room with a tray of freshly filled condiment bowls. “What do you think, Sarah-chan?” she said to her daughter, who was setting the low table for lunch. “Red camellias? Lilies are too tall. Or maybe a branch from the yuzu tree?”

Chan was an affectionate diminutive paired with children’s names, a word with no real equivalent in English. Hearing this endearment on her mother’s lips, after all the years of grammatically correct English, made Sarah absurdly happy. Suddenly shy, she avoided looking at her mother.

“Yuzu sounds nice,” she replied nonchalantly. “The baby fruits are so cute.”

“That’s what we’ll do then,” said her mother, unloading the tiny bowls for Sarah to arrange.

It was two days since they had held hands. A certain awkwardness still hung over them, like that of sweethearts after a first kiss. More than once Sarah had caught her mother watching her with an eager, open look.

Today Mrs. Rexford was in a playful mood. “Mommy,” she called down to Mrs. Kobayashi, “can’t Sarah and I have a little snack before lunch? We’re hungry. Please, pleeeze?”

Mrs. Kobayashi climbed up into the room with a shallow wooden vat of steaming rice. “Kora, what a lazy, spoiled child I’ve got!” she lamented. She shook her head with mock despair at the sight of her grown daughter lolling at the low table, sneaking a bite from one of the condiment bowls. “There’s a plate of sticky-bean cakes in the cabinet,” she said, relenting, “but you’ll just have to wait!”

Mrs. Rexford then turned to her daughter, who was watching the adults’ silliness with a look of wary uncertainty. “Let’s you and I raid the cabinet,” she whispered loudly, “when your grandma’s not looking.” Sarah’s eyes took on the look of a dazzled schoolgirl. Unable to come up with a response, she merely giggled at her mother.

“You two are hopeless,” Mrs. Kobayashi declared, descending the wooden step into the kitchen.

After lunch, Sarah carried the finished yuzu arrangement into the family room. The household altar stood atop a dresser. It was a black lacquered box, with two doors that opened out like a dollhouse. Inside, on shelves, were tablets that looked like miniature headstones, each bearing the name of a deceased member of the Kobayashi line. Some of these tablets were so old, no one knew anything about them. On the bottom shelf were a small white candle, a sand-filled ceramic bowl studded with green incense sticks, a set of prayer beads, and a miniature inverted gong resting on a silk cushion. There was a doll-sized cup for water and a doll-sized cup for rice. Each morning, when Mrs. Kobayashi cooked a fresh batch of rice, she saved the first scoop for the altar-or more precisely for her first husband. Sarah was often awakened by the chinnn of the gong-surprisingly resonant for such a small piece of cast iron-and the muttered sounds of her grandmother praying.

She placed the vase beside the miniature gong, then returned to the kitchen. Her mother was squeezing out a dishcloth and hanging it over a bamboo rod sticking out from the wall.

“Would you mind taking these flowers over to your auntie?” Mrs. Rexford nodded toward a plastic bucket in the kitchen vestibule. It was filled with yellow lilies, picked earlier that day from the garden.

“Wait,” said her grandmother, who was bending over the icebox. “Let me wrap them up first.”

“No, I’ll do that. Stay there.” Mrs. Rexford bounded up the wooden step into the dining room. “I’ll go find some newspaper.”

Carrying the armful of lilies-its scent redolent of wet newsprint, freshly cut stems, and spicy blooms-Sarah headed toward the Asaki house.

The Asaki property was large enough to have several gardens. There was a formal one in the back and another one in the front, and two narrow utilitarian gardens on either side. Sarah took the left-hand path, which led to the kitchen entrance. The air was heavy with the scent of hot flagstones and the mingled smells of foliage opening their pores to the sun. She brushed past a wall of hydrangea bushes that exuded palpable moisture, making the surrounding air almost too thick to breathe.

Her aunt stood framed in the kitchen window, washing dishes. The kitchen entrance was flanked by neatly tended rows of mitsuba, shingiku, and komatsuna. Mrs. Nishimura plucked these tender greens each morning for her family’s miso soup, and often she sent her girls to the Kobayashi house with extras.

“Good afternoon!” Sarah called out.

Her aunt looked up with a welcoming smile, then came to meet her at the door. The kitchen was laced with the sweet, meaty smell of shiitake mushrooms cooked in soy sauce, and the tang of vinegared rice. They must have had chirashizushi for lunch, Sarah thought. “How are you, Auntie,” she said, presenting the newspaper cone with both hands. “They sent you these.”

“Maa, how lovely!” Mrs. Nishimura reached for the flowers with hands still covered in wet rubber gloves. “How well they’re growing this year!” She held the bouquet away from her at arm’s length, as if planning an ikebana arrangement in her mind. Her face, alight with pleasure and gratitude, filled Sarah with sudden shame.

Ever since the cream puff incident had ensured her place in her mother and grandmother’s inner circle, she was aware of taking her aunt’s rightful place.

All through her childhood Sarah had believed adults were immune to certain types of pain, just as lobsters (according to her grandmother) were incapable of feeling boiling water. That was because adults had perspective. They understood why things had to happen; they didn’t take it personally the way children did. This belief had consoled her when she fought with her mother. Regarding her aunt’s adoption, she had assumed that a grown woman would be mature enough to understand the situation.

But recently she had begun to question this. She sometimes imagined herself as her aunt, living just a few houses away and watching her real mother dote on the daughter she had chosen to keep. How would she feel, living so close but unable to rummage for sticky-bean cakes in the Kobayashis’ cupboard, or even drop by unannounced for a cup of tea? She didn’t think she could bear it. It was a wonder that her aunt had, all these years. It was a wonder that everyone involved could go about their daily lives with such equanimity.

All of this stirred within her as she watched her aunt’s glowing face. “Tell them I said thank you!” Mrs. Nishimura was saying.

Sarah felt oddly like crying. “I have to go,” she mumbled. It was a relief to turn away. As she hurried past the hydrangea bushes she remembered seeing her own mother rush off this way after delivering something to the Asaki house. For the first time, she understood the contrition behind the two women’s painstaking complicity. For their happiness, like hers, had come at the cost of someone else.

chapter 12

“What a lovely yuzu arrangement!” praised Mrs. Asaki. She stood before the altar, ready to pray. Sarah sat at the low table and watched her.

Reaching into her clutch purse, the old woman drew out a set of mahogany prayer beads with purple tassels. She also drew out a formal monetary envelope, which she placed on the altar. Her envelopes always contained several crisp ten-thousand-yen bills.

Mrs. Asaki closed her eyes. Reciting rapidly under her breath, she manipulated the beads with deft fingers. Then, switching back instantly from the ethereal to the earthly, she smiled down at Sarah.

“A little shopping for you and your mama.” She nodded toward the envelope with twinkling eyes.

Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Rexford entered the room with trays of tea and refreshments. “Won’t you stay, Granny?” they asked. Mrs. Asaki promptly took a seat at the low table.

Despite their private resentments toward the old woman, Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Rexford seemed to genuinely enjoy these visits. There was, after all, a certain kinship in the women’s extroverted personalities. With Mrs. Nishimura out of the picture, they could all relax and gossip under the guise of religious duty. In no time at all, they were shrieking with laughter.

At one point the talk turned to Mr. Kobayashi. Mrs. Asaki took mischievous delight in exposing her little brother’s childhood trials.

“Some older boys across the creek called him over to play,” she told them. “So he trudged over the bridge, and they boinked him on the head. He came running back, crying. But then they called out their apologies and invited him over again. ‘Kenji, don’t go!’ I told him. But no, he trudged over that bridge yet again-” The old woman did such a good imitation of a little boy’s eager expression that they all burst into laughter. “And he got boinked yet again!”

Sarah, who had just come back from seeing her aunt, was annoyed to see them all having such a good time. They had wronged Aunt Masako. They had no right to be laughing and having so much fun.

Still laughing, the women turned back to their plates. Today was so hot they were eating chilled tofu. “This sauce is divine!” said Mrs. Asaki. “What is it? I can taste the citron zest…and…”

“Miso, and rice wine, and ground-up sesame seeds,” supplied Mrs. Rexford. “By the way, we picked some extra citrons for you to take home.”

A reflective mood fell over them.

“That Kenji…” Mrs. Asaki shook her head indulgently. “All he ever did was play around and dabble in things, right up till he got drafted to Manchuria. We thought he’d never settle down.”

“And then he turned out to be so good at art! Who would have thought?” said Mrs. Kobayashi.

“Now, his little brother,” said Mrs. Asaki, “he was successful from the start. Shoehei was the one people noticed.” Her voice was hushed; Shohei had been her favorite brother.

Mrs. Rexford looked pleased. Mrs. Kobayashi lowered her gaze modestly. It was not her place to say such things, but she was perfectly willing to hear it from her sister-in-law’s lips.

“Shohei was so smart,” Mrs. Asaki told Sarah, “so witty. Always at the head of his class. They picked him for the executive training program when he was only-what? Twenty-five?”

Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Rexford, both smiling, nodded.

Mrs. Asaki grew expansive in her generosity. “It was entirely fitting,” she said, “that the first hieroglyph in his name-sho-stood for rectitude and integrity.”

Sarah recalled old photographs she had seen. Shohei was tall and handsome. Her step-grandfather, Kenji, was handsome too, but much shorter.

A girlish sparkle appeared in Mrs. Asaki’s eyes. “Your grandpa,” she told Sarah, gesturing vaguely toward the other end of the house where Mr. Kobayashi was tap-tapping away in his workshop, “had a secret crush on your grandma for years. But she only had eyes for Shohei.”

Sarah happened to know-she had overheard her parents-that marrying the second Mr. Kobayashi had not been her grandmother’s wish. She had been pressured into it, quite forcefully, by Mrs. Asaki herself.

Sarah had never seen the tough side of Granny; her great-aunt was unfailingly cheerful and charming. But she did remember that when Momoko and Yashiko were small, Mrs. Asaki used to punish them by touching a lit stick of prayer incense to the offending part of their bodies: the hand, if hitting had been the offense; the tongue, if one of them had talked back. It was the old-fashioned method from the country. Momoko had claimed airily that it didn’t hurt at all. “You can’t even see the mark,” she said. But the very idea had made Sarah dizzy with terror.

That night at bedtime, she broached this confusion to her mother.

“You know about uchi versus soto, right?” Mrs. Rexford said.

Uchi versus soto: inner circle versus outer circle. Daytime television was full of family dramas based on this concept. Uchi meant the few allies in whom a woman could place absolute trust. Soto was everyone else-social acquaintances, in-laws, sometimes one’s own children-around whom it was best to remain vigilant.

“Smart women know who’s inside and who’s outside,” Mrs. Rexford said. “Wishy-washy women get confused and make poor decisions.”

“Granny’s outside, right?”

“Of course. And your grandma and I never forget it. But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy her company. Or feel compassion and affection, like civilized human beings. Just as long as those feelings don’t interfere with our true loyalties.”

“But that’s hard,” said Sarah.

“Well, you learn.”

“It would be easier if people were enemies or friends, with nothing in between.”

“That’s a child’s way of thinking,” said her mother. “You’re a young woman now.”

chapter 13

Sarah sat outdoors, trying to remember how it had felt to be a child.

She was perched on the shallow step leading up to the Kobayashis’ visitor gate. The gate had slatted sliding doors, set upon grooved sills that were raised slightly off the ground. If she twisted around and pressed her face against the vertical wooden laths, she could peer in at the walkway of stepping stones and bamboos that led up to the main door. From this vantage point the garden looked bigger, more imposing, the way it used to when she was little.

She sat attuning herself to the afternoon silence. Closing her eyes, she breathed in the smells of the lane: the aged, musty undertones of wood, mellowed with moss and warmed by the sun; hot cotton hung out to air; banks of perspiring leaves in the carefully tended gardens; and floating in from somewhere (someone was cooking a late lunch), a faint bitter whiff of grilled sardines. Mixed in with it all was some complex, private scent inseparable from early childhood.

“Big Sister! Big Sister!”

Sarah looked down the lane toward Mrs. Asaki’s upstairs balcony. Momoko and Yashiko were leaning over the railing, waving at her with all four arms. “How come you’re sitting there all by yourself?” Momoko called. “We’re coming right down!” The two girls vanished from the balcony.

Soon they were all squeezed together on the Kobayashis’ stone step. Rolling their sandaled feet back and forth over the gravel, they discussed ways to amuse themselves. A wind chime tinged, sounding muffled in the humid air.

They decided to play American Emotions. They had invented this game shortly after Sarah’s arrival, while they were playing at the Kobayashi house. Sarah, wanting to seem as Japanese as possible, had been parodying American movies. “I love you, son,” she said in a deep voice. “You are very special to me.” Momoko and Yashiko had been delighted; they recognized this kind of dialogue from Hollywood films that occasionally aired on Japanese television.

Encouraged by their laughter, Sarah had continued. “I care about you, son. I care very deeply.” Even Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Rexford broke into reluctant smiles.

Afterward Momoko said thoughtfully, “It’s like American people use words that are stronger than what they feel. I mean…they yell and cry, but it’s almost like it’s on the outside…” She stopped, unsure how to express herself.

“Americans believe it’s unhealthy to keep feelings inside,” Mrs. Rexford had explained to her nieces. “So if they feel an emotion coming on, they try to get it out of their system before it affects them too much.” Everyone listened respectfully; she was the resident expert on America. “They’re afraid if they keep it in too long, it’ll fester and cause damage.”

“My father isn’t like that,” added Sarah quickly. “He’s more like us, because he grew up on the East Coast.”

Momoko was gazing at Mrs. Rexford, nodding slowly as if cementing this new knowledge into her memory. “So that’s why they’re always talking about the way they feel,” she said.

Sarah had another theory, which she kept to herself because her language skills weren’t up to the task. Americans, she thought, were like people slightly hard of hearing. On an emotional level they didn’t register subtle sounds; they needed loud voices and overly clear enunciation in order to prevent misunderstandings. She herself was perfectly comfortable with this. But ever since entering her grandmother’s household she had noticed a change in her own emotional acuity, as if she had sprouted the ears of a rabbit that could prick forward, swivel, and sense underground vibrations.

“That’s right,” Mrs. Rexford told Momoko. “So their words have a certain thin quality, like you said. It’s like grape juice compared to wine. People like us, we keep our feelings inside and let them ferment-till the happy and the sad and the good and bad get all mixed together so we can’t tell them apart.”

Ever since that day, the three girls had performed many variations of American Emotions. Now they rose up from the stone step, disturbing some pigeons pecking halfheartedly among the gravel. They took their stances in the middle of the lane. They had decided, on Sarah’s suggestion, to do a mental therapy scene. Sarah had the role of therapist; as the tallest and eldest, she held the most authority. Momoko, second-eldest, was the patient. Yashiko stood eagerly by, awaiting the supporting role that would be created for her once the game got under way.

“I’m filled with rage,” said Momoko. “I’m going to kill myself.”

“More emotion, Momo-chan,” Sarah prompted. She realized too late that she should have taken the role of patient instead. It required a certain flamboyance that Momoko seemed to lack.

“I’m filled with rage!” said Momoko loudly. Baring her teeth, she pulled at her hair. “I’m going to kill myself!”

Yashiko clapped with approval and anticipation.

“Excellent! Let it all out!” said Sarah. “Get all your feelings out of your system!”

Momoko stood at a loss, unsure how to improve on what she had already done.

Sarah came to her aid. “But first,” she said, “you’ll need love! Let me give you a hug.” With both arms, she folded Momoko in a tight embrace. The daring physicality of this move drew little shrieks of nervous laughter. Now the game was really under way.

“Pretend you’re chewing gum!” cried Yashiko, recalling one of their previous games. “With your mouth wide open!”

Amid their cries of laughter, Sarah became aware of an urgently hissed “Kora! Kora!” coming from the balcony. It was Mrs. Asaki. Sarah looked up, and for a fleeting instant she caught a look of revulsion in the old woman’s eyes, a look that pierced her to the quick.

She understood instantly that their physical antics were in bad taste. It didn’t matter that she had been mocking these foreign mannerisms in a spirit of Japanese solidarity; her great-aunt would only see that it was an unsavory influence on her cousins. Now Mrs. Asaki would probably talk to her granddaughters in private, explaining that Big Sister came from a “different world” and they mustn’t imitate everything she did. Sarah had grown up listening to Granny Asaki’s talks; she and her cousins had been constantly warned not to imitate the slang used by children from the weaving district, or the precocious mannerisms of child stars on television. “It’s fine for those people,” Mrs. Asaki would say, “but our family has different standards.” All of this flashed through the girl’s mind, and her face burned with humiliation.

By now, they had all stopped playing and were looking up at the balcony. Smiling benevolently, the old woman placed her forefinger to her lips as if noise had been her only concern. Then she gave a little wave and turned away.

Had Sarah imagined that steely look? No. It had been there.

For the first time, she felt the start of a slow-rising anger: against Mrs. Asaki, and against these children who had to be so carefully protected from her crass influence.

chapter 14

Still in shock, Sarah followed her cousins into the Kobayashi house. At the sound of the kitchen door rolling open, Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Rexford looked up from the low dining table where they sat doing sums on scraps of paper. From their guilty expressions, Sarah guessed they had been making financial calculations. In this period of rising yen, the vacation money that Mrs. Rexford had recently converted was increasing in value. And Mrs. Kobayashi’s stock investments, which she secretly funded with part of her household budget, were rising as well. These days, a good many Japanese housewives indulged in financial speculation for pocket money. But they were discreet about it, for such activities were not becoming to a lady.

“Girls! Why don’t you go over to the snack shop and get yourselves some ice cream,” said Mrs. Rexford. “We need a little privacy to discuss adult matters.” She stood up, rummaged in a cupboard drawer, and gave them a handful of loose change.

“What’s wrong, Big Sister?” Momoko asked as they walked over to Mrs. Yagi’s snack shop.

“Nothing,” Sarah replied shortly.

They ate their ice cream sitting outside in public, on a wooden bench set up next to the snack shop. They had purchased the new ice cream phenomenon, Jewelry Box, currently advertised on television. It was a single-serving container of vanilla ice cream, in which “jewels” were embedded: shards of colored ice in red and blue and yellow and green.

The afternoon street was deserted, with cicadas droning in full force. The girls scraped carefully with their wooden spoons. “Look,” said Momoko. “I got a red diamond!”

“I got a green one!” said Yashiko.

As Sarah’s shock wore off, her anger grew. She itched to strike back at Mrs. Asaki, who overprotected her grandchildren at the expense of another child’s feelings. And those grandchildren weren’t even hers!

Yashiko left the bench and wandered away to examine an anthill.

“She really likes bugs,” Momoko remarked. “She says she’s going to be a scientist when she grows up.”

Sarah turned to face Momoko. The gathering force of her feelings flickered into a flame of intention.

“You know what?” she said. “I bet you didn’t know that Granny Asaki isn’t your real grandmother.” After so many weeks of vigilance it was a relief, like poking at a house of cards.

Momoko listened, looking suitably awed. But she accepted the story much more readily than Sarah would have expected.

“I thought there was something funny,” she said finally.

“You did? Really? Why?”

“Because Granny’s so much older than all my friends’ grandmothers.”

“Oh.” That simple logic had never occurred to Sarah.

They sat in silence. Sarah’s anger, now drained, was replaced by dawning horror at what she had just done. If the grown-ups ever found out…! Her mother’s new tenderness, her place in the women’s circle, everything would be ruined.

“You can never, never tell anyone you know,” said Sarah desperately. “Do you promise? Ne, do you promise?”

“Nnn,” agreed Momoko in that bland, agreeable way of children. It did not inspire confidence.

Sarah thrust out her pinkie finger, and Momoko hooked it with her own. But Sarah felt doomed. An eleven-year-old child could not be trusted. She herself had already slipped up, and she’d known for less than a month.

“Sarah-chan, don’t pick at your food,” said Mrs. Rexford. “It’s an insult to your grandmother’s cooking.”

In the two days since the incident with Momoko, Sarah had eaten hardly anything but rice and umeboshi. To the puzzlement of the adults, she had taken to watching television in the middle of the day until Mrs. Rexford firmly turned off the TV set. This afternoon Sarah had hidden away on the garden veranda and watched Mr. Kobayashi sketching designs for his upcoming show.

She now gave a short bow of apology toward her grandmother. She choked down a bite of breaded prawn. Her mother watched her with an inscrutable expression.

“Let’s go for a stroll,” said Mrs. Rexford after dinner. “I want to show you a special place.”

Mother and daughter strolled through the lanes until they reached the main thoroughfare. It was pleasantly busy with evening traffic: people coasting by, straight backed, on bicycles; locals strolling to the bathhouse carrying plastic washbasins and towels.

With the sureness of a local, Mrs. Rexford slipped into a small opening between a cigarette shop and a bus-token stand. Here, tucked away from the outside world, was a pocket-sized temple area. A roofed platform displayed a standing stone Buddha with an outstretched hand. At the foot of the statue lay homely offerings of flowers, in glass household jars washed clean of labels.

“I like this little place,” said Mrs. Rexford. She headed for a bench and Sarah followed her. In the dim gray light of evening, this little clearing had a magical quality. They sat for a while in peaceful companionship.

After a while her mother turned to her and said, very gently, “What’s wrong?”

Before this tenderness to which she was still unaccustomed, Sarah crumbled. As she blurted out her secret, she watched her mother’s eyes change from puzzled concern to sharp comprehension. At this, she began to cry with dry, harsh sobs.

“I don’t know why I did it,” she sobbed. And it was true, for at this point her reasons seemed nothing short of insane.

She hadn’t cried like this with her mother in years. Some detached part of her now savored this reversion to childhood, knowing it was probably the last time she would cry with such abandon.

As if from a great distance, she heard her mother saying, “Sarah-chan, Sarah-chan, it’s not the end of the world. I’m not angry. There’s no need to cry.”

She lifted her eyes. The light had grown slightly grayer. In the silence between her hiccups, she could hear the peaceful pulsing of crickets.

“Momoko would have found out sometime,” Mrs. Rexford said.

“She wasn’t supposed…to know until…” Traditionally, adopted children weren’t told of their status until they came of age. Neighbors and friends were trusted to keep a discreet silence.

“Oh, that doesn’t matter with the second generation,” said Mrs. Rexford. “A grandmother’s hardly the same thing as a mother.”

“But why…then…all the secrecy…”

“It’s to protect Granny Asaki. She wants so much for those girls to think of her as their real grandmother. She’d be really hurt if they switched their affections to someone else. But as long as they pretend not to know about it, there’s no harm done.”

“But I’m afraid…Momo-chan will blab. I’ve been so worried.”

“It’ll be all right,” said Mrs. Rexford confidently. “Sure, she might tell someone, but it’ll be her mother, it won’t be Granny. That girl knows her way around. This is how it is when you grow up in a complicated family. Your aunt and I were like that too. We were used to the pressure, so we never buckled.”

Sarah felt utterly chastened.

“I’ll go talk to your auntie tomorrow, just to make sure,” Mrs. Rexford said. “But don’t worry. It’ll be all right.”

“Will she be mad?” At the thought of her aunt’s gentle face, Sarah almost began to cry again.

“To tell you the truth,” her mother said, “I think she’d like her girls to know who their real grandma is.” There was a knowing quality in her voice that made Sarah realize that the sisters, for all their differences, shared some deep, unspoken rapport.

“Slipups happen to the best of us,” Mrs. Rexford continued. “Your auntie learned about her situation when she was about Momoko’s age.”

“Oh no…”

“She heard a rumor at school and came to me to ask if it was true. She was quiet, kind of shaken. She seemed so alone. I sat her down and told her that our mother never wanted to give her away, that she’d always regretted it. I think it helped. I hope it helped.”

They sat quietly. The dusk had deepened, and the standing Buddha was now a flat, dark silhouette.

“Did she talk to Granny?”

“No. We kept that conversation a secret from the adults. To this very day, neither your grandma nor Granny has any idea she found out early.”

Sarah lifted her face to look at her mother. Their eyes met in relief that they had been spared such a fate.

Never again was Sarah fully at ease around the Asaki household.

She was ashamed to meet her aunt Masako’s eyes. And in Momoko she no longer saw a simple child, but an additional complication in the forward-thinking game. Now, if her grandmother bought her a new dress or a trinket, Sarah hid it from her cousins. She constantly searched Momoko’s eyes, alert for any signs of jealousy.

If she could be so angry after just one look from Mrs. Asaki, then how could it not be different for her aunt and cousin? What resentments did they feel that they could not express?

Thus it came about that Sarah drew away from the Asaki house, choosing to adopt the social boundaries of her elders. As the years passed, the distance between the girls would grow to resemble that of the generation before them.

chapter 15

In the parlor, next to the tokonoma alcove, a narrow storage recess ran horizontally along the wall. It had miniature sliding doors made of the same durable paper as the fusuma room dividers. This space had been designed to store seasonal hanging scrolls, but the Kobayashis used it for their photograph albums.

Five years ago Sarah had preferred the newer vinyl albums, filled with pictures of herself as a baby and a toddler. But ever since the talk about black-market rice and snakes and adoptions, she had become curious about the older albums at the back of the shelf. Those books were of better quality, covered with aged fabric that had faded to shades of brown and indigo. Their silk tassels, now rust colored, still had centers of bright purple.

Today she was leafing hurriedly through the “war and occupation” album. There weren’t many pictures from that period, barely enough to fill up the book. The photographs were tiny. Some were the size of playing cards and others even smaller, glued onto the black cardboard pages like stamps in a collection.

She was looking for a specific photograph, and here it was: the only picture of Mr. Kobayashi’s former wife. It had been taken in their garden in Manchuria, a year before she contracted typhoid fever and died. She had a round, blank face and rosebud lips, exactly like a kokeshi doll, and she was so petite she made young Mr. Kobayashi look tall in contrast. The baby boy bundled in her arms would also contract the fever, but survive. After the war, Mr. Kobayashi would bring his sickly baby back to Japan and marry Sarah’s widowed grandmother. This baby was Sarah’s uncle Teinosuke.

She was looking for this picture because her uncle was coming for lunch today, and she had overheard her grandmother saying in wry tones that Teinosuke took after his mother. To the girl’s disappointment, the face on the page revealed no new clues to the woman’s personality. She scrutinized the picture, remembering Mrs. Asaki’s words at their last tea. She had always assumed this doll-like creature was a romantic lost love, a parallel to her grandmother’s Shohei. But in fact she had been second choice…just as her husband was now.

Sarah’s uncle lived almost two hours away in Osaka. He was the same age as Mrs. Nishimura, and he was a bachelor. More important, he was insignificant within the family. He was on the periphery of the women’s “outside” circle.

But none of this was outwardly evident. When he arrived, a heaping platter of his favorite food was awaiting him on the low dining table: fried pot stickers stuffed with pork, ginger, and garlic. This was accompanied by individual dipping bowls of soy sauce, vinegar, and hot chili oil. “Chili oil makes you sweat,” Mrs. Kobayashi had explained to Sarah as they set the table. “Sweating is very healthy in the summer.”

Teinosuke Kobayashi was noticeably shorter than his stepmother and stepsister. Either the babyhood fever had stunted his growth, or else he had inherited his natural mother’s petite frame. Young Teinosuke had been afflicted, all throughout grade school, with thin, flyaway hair (“sort of brownish, like a Caucasian baby, very strange,” Mrs. Rexford said), which was surely a lingering effect of the fever. Perhaps the illness had also affected his ability to learn. His grades were poor, and he was the only child in their entire extended family who had not gone to college.

But now, in adulthood, he exuded good health. Peering up at the others from under a glossy shock of black hair, he tucked into the gyoza heartily, his Adam’s apple working up and down. He talked unendingly about business-he worked with insurance of some kind-in a loud, knowing voice.

“Aaa,” replied his father, nodding and chuckling affably. “Aaa…Aaa… is that right.” But eventually the elder Mr. Kobayashi excused himself from the table and returned to his workshop. Over the years, his son’s academic and professional disappointments had cooled his interest. For Mr. Kobayashi, who had always lived in the shadow of his more accomplished brother, success was extremely important.

After Mr. Kobayashi’s departure, there was an awkward silence.

“Tei-kun,” said Mrs. Rexford. “Are you still playing pachinko as much as you used to?”

Her stepbrother replied, rather stiffly, that he was.

“Take me sometime,” she teased. “Come on!”

“No!” he said, scandalized. “You know nice women don’t go to pachinko parlors!”

“You could be my chaperone. It would be fun.”

“No, no,” he said, shaking his head grimly. “It wouldn’t be proper.” But exercising this masculine authority had revived his confidence; before long he was bragging again about business.

Long ago, Teinosuke Kobayashi had wielded great power within the family. As a child he had been instinctively clever about leveraging his position as a sick, motherless boy. When his stepmother disciplined him he sought out his father and complained, knowing he would get full sympathy. For Mr. Kobayashi had finally realized that although his wife performed all her duties with conscientious effort, she was never going to love him. And he found little ways to punish her for it.

Teinosuke also had a champion in Mrs. Asaki. If he ran down the lane to tell on his stepmother, the older woman marched right over to the Kobayashi house to demand an explanation for the boy’s tears. In those days, despite the boundaries protecting her own adopted daughter, Mrs. Asaki had no qualms about meddling and keeping her sister-in-law in her place.

Yoko, several years older than her stepbrother, had watched all this and seethed. Knowing better than to confront Mrs. Asaki or her stepfather, she did all she could to make life easier for her mother. Her grades were impeccable, as was her conduct at home. She kept a sharp eye on Teinosuke. She itched to punish him in private, but that would have created even more trouble for her mother.

Sarah had little sense of how hard those years had been for her grandmother. But she did understand that time had brought about a gradual power shift. She felt great sympathy for her uncle. Apparently her mother did too; her stepbrother’s reduced position brought out a noblesse oblige that was so warm and natural, so heartfelt, that even Sarah fell under its spell. Of course Mrs. Rexford was capable of putting on an act. And yet-the girl was sure of it-there was genuine kindness there, a kindness that belied or at least balanced out her earlier disparaging remarks.

“Remember that time, Tei-kun,” Mrs. Rexford was saying, “when you ate three bowls of noodle soup at one sitting? Aaa, those were the days, weren’t they?”

“They were, Big Sister,” he said. Sarah was moved by his childish honorific.

After a leisurely lunch, Teinosuke took his leave. He ruffled Sarah’s hair before stepping down into the vestibule. He had always been a kind uncle.

Afterward, washing dishes in the kitchen, Mrs. Rexford gave a snort of laughter. “Good Lord!” she said. “Will he ever stop putting on airs.” But she didn’t seem bothered. In fact, she seemed quite cheerful.

“You know what?” she told her mother. “I think living in America has liberated me.”

“Soh? How’s that?”

“I didn’t feel any anger today,” Mrs. Rexford said. “Not even a twinge. It’s all gone.” She hummed a little tune as she rinsed a porcelain dipping bowl.

“You did seem to have a good time,” agreed Mrs. Kobayashi. She took the wet bowl from her daughter’s hand and wiped it with a dishcloth.

“That’s because I have perspective,” Mrs. Rexford boasted. “I can empathize with the little boy he used to be.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“This is so encouraging,” said Mrs. Rexford happily. “If it can happen with someone like Teinosuke, just think how nice it’s going to be when Tama comes to visit!”

chapter 16

Tama Kobayashi-now Mrs. Tama Izumi-was Mrs. Kobayashi’s final child, the only offspring of the second marriage. She lived in Tokyo with her husband and little boy. In a few days, they would be riding out on the bullet train for an extended visit.

“It’s good timing,” Mrs. Rexford told Sarah. “You can relax around your aunt Tama. She’s real family.” They exchanged a knowing glance.

Sarah couldn’t wait. Her aunt Tama had been pretty and fun-loving, with fashionable clothes and bright lipstick. The girl could remember a time when her aunt was still unmarried, when she used to live here at home. She was constantly going off on dates in her fiancé’s sports car instead of taking the streetcar like everyone else. Little Sarah, intoxicated by this whiff of an exciting outside world, had trailed her everywhere. She had fantasized about having her for a big sister. She had fantasized about having her for a mother.

In preparation for the Izumis’ visit, Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Rexford began pulling down extra futons from the storage closet. They hung them out to air in the laundry area, which was a tiny cement courtyard with a covered drain in the middle. One accessed it through the family room, stepping down from an inner veranda onto a neat row of red plastic utility slippers. This roofless space was rigged with washing lines for light items such as clothing, and sturdy bamboo poles for the heavier items. The strong summer sun flooded down, and the air quickly became suffused with the scent of warm cotton.

“Little Jun and his father can sleep in the receiving room,” panted Mrs. Kobayashi as the two women, working in unison, heaved a silk coverlet over a lowered bamboo pole. Its patterned side faced out. The red and blue carp were slightly faded from age and sun, but the silk had been protected from human skin by a wide rim of white cotton casing. “Tama can squeeze in with the two of you in the parlor.”

“Banzai!” cried Sarah happily. She was perched on the ledge of the inner veranda, swinging her bare legs and watching her elders as she nibbled on a snack of dried whitebait and cheese.

“So as I was saying”-Mrs. Rexford was also panting-“I was always so harsh to her and now I feel bad about it.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “You were only children.”

The women lifted the bamboo pole in unison. Raised arms trembling with effort, each fitted her end into the loop of twine hanging overhead. Then Mrs. Rexford said, “I have a confession to make. Remember that time Tama drank the entire bottle of rationed milk from the icebox?”

“I do. I had to lie and tell Father I’d mismanaged the household funds. Aaa, he was so angry…”

“Well,” said Mrs. Rexford, “I cornered Tama afterward. I was so mad I slapped her, right across the face.”

“Oh, Yo-chan! She was just a little girl!” Then after a pause, “What did she do?”

“She stood there and sniffled. I said, ‘Look what you’ve done! My mother’s getting yelled at, and it’s all because of you!’

“She looked ashamed, but she stuck out her chin and said, ‘She’s my mother too.’ I told her, ‘Then act like it!’”

Having finished with the futons, the two women climbed up onto the veranda and into the shade of the family room. Sinking down gratefully onto the floor cushions, they picked up round paper uchiwa and fanned the moisture from their faces.

Sarah followed them inside. “What’s for lunch?” she asked timidly. But the women were too engrossed to pay her any attention.

“But Tama never learned,” continued Mrs. Rexford. “Time would pass, then she’d do something else just as thoughtless. That was the problem.”

Mrs. Kobayashi nodded regretfully. They fanned themselves in silence.

Little Tama had grown up largely unaffected by family tensions. She had both of her natural parents and she knew nothing about her half sister’s adoption, at least until she was older. In truth she was a little self-centered. Mrs. Kobayashi, typical of postwar mothers, had raised her with unusual leniency, as if to atone for those hardships that had forced her older children into premature adulthood. Or maybe the girl was just born that way; someone had once remarked that she was, after all, Kenji Kobayashi’s daughter.

“But she was always a good girl at heart,” said Mrs. Rexford, “never sneaky or mean-spirited like Teinosuke. When I think of her following me around, wanting my approval no matter how much I scolded her…” She stopped, overcome with emotion.

“There, there,” soothed Mrs. Kobayashi. She reached over with the uchiwa and gently fanned her daughter’s face. “Forget all that. You’re both grown women, and this is your chance to develop a true womanly friendship. Ne?”

Mrs. Rexford nodded.

“I know how much you wanted that with Masako,” said Mrs. Kobayashi.

Mrs. Rexford nodded again. It was a source of sorrow that Mrs. Nishimura, whom she romantically regarded as her “true” sister, never dropped her outside face in her presence-or in the presence of anyone else. “It’s so hard to talk to her,” Mrs. Rexford had lamented. “She won’t even gossip.”

“At least with Tama,” said Mrs. Kobayashi, “you have a chance.”

Real family, all staying in the same house! Even after her experience with the Asaki household, Sarah had romantic notions about large families. She liked the companionable lulls: she and her cousins often sat on the garden veranda, watching Mr. Kobayashi as he chain-smoked and stared off into space and sketched in hurried spurts. With the women’s occasional laughter in the background, the girls sat contentedly within the aromatic haze of his cigarette smoke, sucking on popsicles from the snack shop. Being on the periphery of adult focus was a new experience for Sarah. She liked it. It felt like a sign of tacit approval.

Neighbors, too, were family. There was always someone nearby to whom she could bow a greeting: housewives in the narrow lane, buying greens from the vendor’s cart; an old man wearing geta and watering the shrubs outside his slatted wooden gate. Even strangers, passing through on their way to somewhere else, seemed to know who Sarah was. Early on she had made the mistake of bowing to random people in the open-air market, assuming everyone knew her family. “Who were you bowing to just now?” her mother or grandmother would ask, puzzled.

Best of all were the titles of familiarity. Friends of the family, shop clerks, even strangers who happened to drop handkerchiefs in the street were addressed as Auntie, or Big Brother, or Granny. To Sarah’s satisfaction, Momoko and Yashiko addressed her as Big Sister.

“Don’t you miss living here?” she once asked her mother. “Don’t you ever wish you’d married someone from Japan?”

“No,” said Mrs. Rexford. “And if I had, you wouldn’t be here right now.”

“Yes, I would! And I’d be completely Japanese, instead of just half.”

It wasn’t that Sarah had anything against Fielder’s Butte. She liked its austere beauty: miles of empty fields that, in summer, gave off an aroma like bran muffins; giant oak trees left over from Indian days; an industrial-sized sky of flat blue, blank except for the freewheeling hawk or the white trail of a plane. But thinking of it now gave her a forlorn feeling.

This, here, was the center of the world. The landscape confirmed it: hills of bright green rising up all around them, a lovely distraction to her unaccustomed eye. Sometimes in the evening, when she and her elders strolled home from the bathhouse in the gentle gray light of the narrow lanes, she looked up at the hills glowing in the last pink wash of sunset. In that light they loomed so close, so clear, she could make out individual trees packed tightly together like broccoli florets. “In ancient days,” her mother explained, “those hills kept our city safe from invading warrior clans. That’s why it was the perfect location for the royal court.” As they headed home, Sarah felt those hills shielding them from the huge sky that, in Fielder’s Butte, made the sunsets so lonely and stark.

chapter 17

Tama Izumi was the most beautiful of the three sisters. She had full, perfectly formed lips like the Egyptian queen Nefertiti. She exuded a womanly coquetry that Sarah, despite her own lack of experience, instantly recognized as being attractive to the opposite sex. But unlike some beautiful women, Mrs. Izumi extended her good-natured flirtation to women and children alike, as if inviting everyone to share in her feminine appeal.

“Oh, Sarah-chan, you’ve turned out so pretty!” she said, and the girl fell in love with her all over again.

The women followed Mrs. Izumi into the parlor and kept her company while she unpacked her suitcases. This took a long time, for she kept stopping to chat.

“It seems like yesterday that your mother brought you home from the hospital, in a little bundle,” Mrs. Izumi told Sarah.

“Remember that time you babysat,” Mrs. Rexford said, “and you fed her mandarin oranges? I was so mad when I found those seeds in her diaper.”

“But, Big Sister, she wanted some!” Mrs. Izumi protested, laughing. “I swear! She threw a tantrum every time I stopped!”

Little Jun trotted into the room and stood over the open suitcase. He was an active four-year-old whose small brown legs, clad in little boys’ short pants, were constantly on the move. His mother drew out a stack of tiny shirts and placed them in an open bureau drawer. “Those are mine,” he told the women.

“Jun-chan, what a nice baseball cap you’ve got!” said Mrs. Rexford. It was navy blue with a yellow tiger’s head on it, for Han-shin Tigers. Mr. Kobayashi had given it to him when he arrived. “You’re one of the menfolk now,” he had told the boy, reaching down to tweak his visor. Over the next few days the boy would insist on wearing this cap everywhere, even to the bathhouse.

“I’m one of the menfolk,” Jun now told them.

“You certainly are!” said his grandmother. “It’s a lucky thing you’re here to protect us!”

Mrs. Rexford and Mrs. Izumi were reminiscing about friends of their youth. Bored, the little boy wandered away to the other end of the house.

“Mother,” said Mrs. Izumi, “whatever happened to Big Sister’s old boyfriend? The one who was studying Middle Eastern history?”

“Sekizaki-kun,” supplied Mrs. Rexford.

“Soh, Sekizaki-kun! I hear he goes around consulting for the big petroleum companies now,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “Who could have guessed, back then, what would happen with Arab oil?” She turned to Sarah. “He was an odd one,” she explained. “For whatever reason, he was fascinated with that part of the world. Think: all that work to get into Kyoto University, then he defied his poor parents and studied the most impractical subject ever.”

“He had bite, that one,” said Mrs. Rexford.

“What’s bite?” asked Sarah.

“It’s a certain bravery,” said her grandmother, “an originality of intellect. Your mother’s boyfriends, they all had bite. Some of them are important men now.”

“No fair, Big Sister!” cried Mrs. Izumi in mock distress. “How come none of my boyfriends went on to careers of intellect?”

They all giggled.

“That’s because you dated bon-bons,” her sister said. Bon-bons were handsome, dashing boys from wealthy families who focused on sports cars and skiing trips instead of their studies.

Mrs. Izumi responded with a sour look, and they all laughed again.

Mrs. Izumi had met her husband in college. He was good looking and extremely polite; Sarah considered him romantic. His father was chief of neurosurgery at Osaka Municipal Hospital, but Mr. Izumi himself worked as an office manager. “Our Jun’s going to be a doctor. He’s going to take after his granddaddy,” Mrs. Izumi told the women.

Right now Mr. Izumi was in the family room, watching baseball. Mr. Kobayashi had joined him there, abandoning his work in order to play host. The men seemed slightly off-kilter, like caged animals waiting for their next meal. But they shared a certain solidarity, perhaps because they had been bon-bons in their youth. Little Jun, torn between his desire for male companionship and his attraction to the merrier women with their direct access to food, wandered back and forth between the two camps.

“What’s in this bag here?” asked Mrs. Rexford. She peeked inside. “What are all these books and magazines? Watchtower? What’s that, Jehovah’s Witness? Tama, are you into Christianity now?”

Her stepsister nodded sheepishly.

Tama Izumi’s personality had always tended toward the dramatic. Several years ago she had discovered Confucianism, and she had announced this conversion by sending the Rexfords a hardbound religious text written in the original Chinese, which no one could possibly have known how to read. Before that, it had been some fundamentalist sect of Buddhism, and Sarah had received a child’s comic book depicting in lurid, colorful detail all the intricate levels of hell.

“Hmm,” said Mrs. Rexford, losing interest.

“Auntie, what was it like growing up with Mama?” Sarah asked.

“Well,” said Mrs. Izumi, “everyone admired your mother very much. But”-she made a little pout with her lovely lips-“she could be very mean to her little sister!”

“That’s because you were a pest,” replied Mrs. Rexford with an affectionate bluntness she would never have used with Mrs. Nishimura. “You were always bothering me and stealing my things.”

Mrs. Izumi pretended not to hear. “Sarah-chan,” she continued, “are you aware that your grandmother used to make me tiptoe past your mother’s room while she was studying for exams? And then Big Sister would complain I was breathing too loud, and I’d get scolded!” She was so droll, so childishly indignant, that everyone burst into infectious laughter.

As an only child, Sarah found this fascinating and vaguely unsettling. Sibling rivalry was perfectly normal, she knew. But after so many weeks of heightened tact, it was odd to hear her grandmother’s favoritism acknowledged so blatantly. Perhaps over the years, other family tensions had drained her grandmother and mother of sensitivity toward the baby of the family. After all, Tama was the lucky one. She had grown up with her real mother and father, she had been spared the war years, and she was clearly vocal enough to stand up for herself.

“Did you notice,” whispered Mrs. Rexford later that day in the kitchen, “how she steered completely clear of the altar?”

Mrs. Kobayashi reached into the icebox for a package of yakisoba noodles. “Well, you know,” she said. “Our tablets are barbaric idols, according to the Bible.”

Mrs. Rexford snorted with impatience.

Mrs. Kobayashi sighed. “I wouldn’t mind so much if it was a quiet, dignified sort of religion,” she said. “But those people insist on going around and ringing strangers’ doorbells, like peddlers from the deep country.”

“I know. We have Jehovah’s Witnesses in America too.”

This was why the Izumis were visiting now in the beginning of July, instead of waiting until the midmonth O-bon holiday when families traditionally came together. Their new religion forbade the celebration of holidays: not just Buddhist holidays like O-bon, but also Christian holidays such as Christmas and-even worse in Sarah’s opinion-neutral holidays such as children’s birthdays.

“I don’t understand,” Mrs. Rexford said, “why she can’t spend two minutes making a gesture of respect to her forebears.” No one in the house, with the possible exception of Mrs. Kobayashi, was religious in a theological sense. Praying at the altar was routine, like eating rice or bowing hello.

Mrs. Kobayashi dropped a handful of onions into the sizzling oil, and its aroma drifted up into the dining room. Sarah, setting the low table, sniffed appreciatively.

Mrs. Rexford popped her head around the shoji screen. “Where is everybody?” she asked the girl.

“They’re all out in the garden.”

Her mother’s head withdrew.

Eventually Sarah heard her saying, “When you die, Mother, and your tablet goes on those shelves, what does she plan to do then?”

“It’ll blow over before that. Don’t worry so much. Just enjoy being sisters.”

Mrs. Rexford said nothing.

chapter 18

Sarah woke in the dark. Beside her, lying on sun-aired futons, her mother and her aunt were whispering.

She couldn’t quite follow what they were saying. She was groggy and the vocabulary was difficult. They seemed to be discussing philosophy.

She lay still, letting their voices drift through her mind. What time was it? The long drapes were shut, but above them a narrow rectangular window stretched from wall to wall. Through its wooden slats, the night sky glowed an eerie Prussian blue. The trees in the garden cast strange shadows on the walls.

She still had moments of dissonance when she felt like a Westerner. She was aware of the house’s smell: an exotic combination of wood, tatami straw, prayer incense, rice. Sometimes when she brushed her teeth she noticed, wafting in through the open window, some baffling night scent she could only associate with melons.

“…and his heart is so vast,” Mrs. Izumi was saying, “he feels identical love for each one of his children. Robber or saint, it makes no difference-we are all the same in his eyes.”

“It seems kind of impersonal,” Mrs. Rexford said, “to measure out the exact same love for everybody, like sugar in a rationing line.”

But it might be preferable, Sarah thought, to knowing that someone else was getting more than you.

“But that’s what makes it a miracle.” Mrs. Izumi seemed anxious to make her sister understand. “It’s exact and fair like a science, but it’s also extremely personal at the same time.”

Mrs. Izumi had a new Tokyo accent, not just because she lived in Tokyo but because she had purposely cultivated standardized speech. She used phrases like “namely” or “the truth of the matter.” Sarah knew this annoyed her mother, who scorned verbal posturing and took great pride in her Kyoto accent.

“…so you can see its significance,” her aunt continued. She had been talking for what felt like a long time. Sarah wanted to change position on the futon, but she was afraid to move. She had never heard this tone in her aunt’s voice before. The playfulness was gone; she was making a self-conscious effort to converse on the same level as her sister. Perhaps Mrs. Rexford sensed this too, for she murmured, “Nnn hnn,” without any more commentary or dissent.

It had never occurred to Sarah that grown people would want to change their identities. She’d thought identity was like height: it resolved itself by the early twenties, one accepted it and moved on.

In that moment, her longtime crush on her aunt Tama began to fade. It was a surprise, like ice cracking. She saw ahead to a time when her crush would be a faint, poignant memory, and she felt a pang of sorrow.

Outdoors, someone clapped two heavy wood blocks together. There was a long pause. Then the kon…kon… sound came again, closer and more piercing, leaving a high-pitched ringing in the ears. Heavy footsteps sounded in the lane, striding hurriedly over the gravel.

Mrs. Izumi paused in her monologue. “Hi-no-yojin duty,” she murmured, suddenly sounding soft and wistful. This was the traditional neighborhood reminder to make sure all fires were extinguished before going to bed. Centuries ago, their ancestors had listened to this same sound as they rested their heads on wooden pillows.

“Nnn,” murmured Mrs. Rexford. She yawned. “They’re late tonight.” So it was only ten or eleven o’clock, not the early hours of morning as Sarah had thought.

“Remember,” said Mrs. Izumi, “when we used to go with Papa, and he’d let us clap the blocks?” A hint of Kyoto dialect had crept into her voice, giving it a singsong quality. For the first time since her arrival, she actually sounded like someone’s little sister. For a surprising instant Sarah was transported back to a time before her own birth, to some long-lost ordinary night when these two sisters must have lain in bed as children. Then, as quickly as it had come, the moment vanished.

“Soh ne…,” agreed Mrs. Rexford, echoing her sister’s nostalgia. “Tama-chan, can you believe how fast the time went?”

“I know, Big Sister…so fast…”

The footsteps faded, and the intermittent claps grew fainter. In their wake, night settled with finality over the houses.

Then Mrs. Rexford said, “It was interesting, what we talked about. I’ll definitely think it over.” Her voice held the same gentleness Sarah remembered from the lunch with her uncle Teinosuke. For a moment, the girl wondered if her mother was actually thinking of converting.

“I’ll show you my books tomorrow,” said Mrs. Izumi. Those brief moments of shared nostalgia must have eased something in her mind, for she didn’t follow it up with any more big words. They lay silent as if in a spell, listening to the last faint echoes of the wooden blocks.

chapter 19

The next day, while the Izumis were away paying their respects at the Asaki house, Sarah saw her grandmother’s private photograph album for the first time.

She had been asking questions-about the war, about her real grandfather. “You’re becoming quite the historian,” Mrs. Kobayashi laughed, and turned to Mrs. Rexford. “What do you think, Yo-chan?” she said. “Is she ready to see some pictures?”

This album wasn’t kept in the storage recess like the others. Mrs. Kobayashi opened a bureau drawer and slid it out from between layers of seldom-worn kimonos.

“Let’s not mention this to anyone,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. She and Mrs. Rexford carefully turned the pages, with freshly washed hands smelling of soap.

“When your mother was young,” Mrs. Kobayashi said, “I used to show this book to her.”

Mrs. Rexford had very few memories of her real father. She had been three when he went off to war. Mrs. Kobayashi had been twenty-seven and pregnant with Masako.

“Here he is in his judo gear…Here he is at a company gathering…”

Shohei Kobayashi was handsome, like an old-time movie star, with perfectly proportioned features and eyes like elegant brushstrokes. Sarah had never seen a man like this outside of a samurai film.

“Here he is, holding your mother.” They all leaned in to scrutinize the black-and-white photograph.

“Every minute he had free, he was carrying your mother. Walking around, always holding her in one arm.”

“I think I remember being held by him,” Mrs. Rexford said.

“Your mother got carried around so much, with her arm curled around his neck or mine, that when she was set down she’d forget to move her left arm.”

The two women laughed wistfully.

“He’s really handsome,” said Sarah.

“Oh, do you think so?” her grandmother asked.

“Mother,” said Mrs. Rexford, “don’t be coy.”

They had met through work. Before her marriage, Mrs. Kobayashi had been a typist in the head office of a large Kobe corporation-not a common typist (as she always emphasized), but a foreign-language typist, using a machine equipped with English alphabet keys. In the 1930s English proficiency was a status symbol, proof of the higher education given to daughters from wealthy, academically liberal families. She had worn high heels to the office, and modish Western dresses with zippers and buttons and flounces. After work, she and a group of coworkers frequented the new dance halls, where waltzes and foxtrots were all the rage among the young well-to-do. Shohei was a young executive from the Kyoto branch who often visited the head office on business.

“Is this you, Grandma? You look so glamorous.” Sarah stared at a picture of a young woman with bobbed hair, lipstick, and a mischievous expression. “These pictures are so different from the others! It’s like a whole different world.”

“Granny Asaki was always jealous,” remarked Mrs. Rexford, “because your grandma came from a cosmopolitan background and she didn’t.”

“Look at this one,” Mrs. Kobayashi said quickly. “It’s our wedding reception.”

The photograph had been taken at night. A large party boat blazed with prewar exuberance: red paper lanterns hanging above the deck, serving women in dark kimonos balancing lacquered trays of sushi above their heads as they wove sinuously among the tightly packed guests. Sarah could almost hear the gay twanging of the stringed shamisen and the guests clapping time, their reserve loosened by cups of sake.

Mrs. Kobayashi gave a little smile. “I’ve often looked back on that boat,” she said, “from the distance of time.” Sarah wondered how she pictured it. Closing her own eyes, she imagined a small oasis of light and laughter, bobbing on the water’s dark expanse and spilling an occasional “To your future!” that faded into the night above the quiet lapping of the bay.

It was strange how both women, in different ways, had ended up falling from their youthful heights. Sarah wasn’t sure how to account for this. She could only sense vaguely that life was like a maze, and sometimes, through no fault of your own, a perfectly good path could veer off in an unexpected direction.

Over the next few days, Mrs. Izumi launched into her campaign of religious conversion. The women were patient and accommodating as she interrupted their conversations with clumsy segues into “love” or “the Lord.” But Sarah saw in her mother the restless eye movements, the flared nostrils through which she breathed rather more loudly than usual. She was worried for her aunt; couldn’t she see she was alienating the very people whose circle she wanted to enter?

One afternoon Sarah and the three women were sitting down to tea in the family room. The men were out playing tennis with some of Mr. Kobayashi’s friends. Little Jun had gone downtown with Mrs. Asaki and the girls.

“Here, you do the honors,” Mrs. Kobayashi told Mrs. Rexford, gesturing toward the teapot. She knew her daughter wanted to practice her tea skills as much as possible; she often complained that living in America had made her rusty.

Mrs. Izumi turned to Sarah and said with mock sadness, “You see? I never get to pour.”

Sarah played along. “Because you’re the youngest?”

“That’s right.” Actually Mrs. Izumi had little interest in the tea ceremony. Both daughters had been formally trained in tea and koto, but only for Mrs. Rexford were they important as the last remnants of their old Kobe lineage. In those difficult early years, mother and daughter had bonded by honing the social skills that elevated them above the Asakis.

Mrs. Rexford lifted the teapot, giving it a gentle swirl before pouring the tea into thin porcelain cups. To Sarah’s relief, the tea service was casual. The formal teas, which she usually avoided, took place in the parlor. They involved heavy glazed bowls with deceptively rustic “flaws,” a cast-iron teapot, and a wooden whisk for frothing the matcha tea, which tasted bitter to the girl’s untrained tongue. Even the formal sweets were disappointing. Since the bitterness of the tea required a correspondingly strong sweetness, her grandmother served tiny artistic confections that, while beautiful to look at, tasted like pure sugar. “It’s the blend of opposites that makes it pleasurable,” she had explained.

Today’s tea was a mild sencha. Sarah would have preferred cold barley tea, but such a watered-down drink, she knew, was too lowly even for an informal tea: one gave it to small children or else drank it from a thermos in place of water. At least her snack of ohagi, a sticky rice ball covered with sweet bean paste, was something she could really sink her teeth into.

As each woman accepted her tea with a slight bow of thanks, a polite silence fell over the table. The first sip was followed by formal murmurs of appreciation. Then, since it was a casual tea, Mrs. Izumi resumed the thread of her earlier conversation.

Sarah took an absentminded pleasure in watching the women’s fluid movements. It was like ballet above the waist; their precise alignment came from a lifetime of practice. Sarah envied their lack of concentration. She herself was always stiff and self-conscious when she took tea. She had sensed this same self-consciousness in Mrs. Asaki and Mrs. Nishimura. They made the right movements but they came from the brain, not from muscle memory. Sarah, remembering her recent grievance against Mrs. Asaki, felt a smug flash of pride in these women sitting beside her.

“So that big religious conference my friend went to, it was in the southern part of the country. I wanted to go too,” Mrs. Izumi said. “But my husband put his foot down.”

“People down in those southern areas eat a lot of pork,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “They boil enormous chunks of it in iron kettles, along with cabbage and all kinds of strange things.”

“It wasn’t in Okinawa, Mother,” Mrs. Izumi corrected her. “It was a normal suburb of Kagoshima.” With the snobbery of mainland dwellers, the women regarded Okinawans as not quite Japanese, existing in the same category as Ainu aborigines from Hokkaido.

“ Kagoshima has its own regional cuisine, doesn’t it?” said Mrs. Rexford. “When I went there on my school trip…”

Doggedly, Mrs. Izumi tried to steer the topic back to religion. Finally she pulled out a thin book from the pile next to her floor cushion. Turning to Sarah, she said, “Anyway, my friend brought me back some books. This one’s for you.”

Sarah was pleased, for her aunt usually ignored her when she discussed religion. “Wait, what does that word mean?” Sarah always demanded at crucial moments, knowing her mother and grandmother wouldn’t mind the intrusion. “Wait, wait! What does it mean?”

“Thank you, Auntie,” she said now, accepting the book with both hands and examining the cover. Some of the Chinese characters were unfamiliar-she recognized only the ideograms for thousand, love, and ultimate-but the illustration was clear enough. There was a grassy park with children of various nationalities laughing and playing in the foreground. Behind them, smiling parents strolled two by two beneath colorful fruit trees, past a lion and a lamb lying together in the shade.

The two women paused in their discussion of boiled pork. With wary expressions, they leaned forward-straight-backed, still in proper tea posture-to peer at the cover.

“Very nice,” said Mrs. Kobayashi faintly.

“Would you be interested,” Mrs. Izumi asked Sarah, “in meeting some people your age from the local branch?”

“A, a! Don’t even think about it,” said Mrs. Rexford. “The children are off limits.”

“Fine.” Mrs. Izumi sighed with comical resignation. She sipped her tea and took a bite of her ohagi. Then she looked up at the two women, this time with a flash of defiance. “You two don’t take me seriously,” she said. “I’m like a lapdog to you. Cute. Silly. A nuisance.”

The women looked up from their teacups.

“What if it turned out I wasn’t so stupid after all? What if it turned out I had the key to something that could completely change your lives?”

Mrs. Rexford thought for a moment. “I don’t think you’re stupid,” she said finally. “And maybe you do have the key. But right now I don’t want to change my life. I just want to talk with you like a real person, Tama-chan. I can’t seem to find you underneath all this religion.”

“But Big Sister, this is me.”

“It’s not the sister I used to know.”

“Well, of course not! I’ve grown up. I can’t live in your shadow forever. And now I have something important to share. I can teach you something. So why won’t you let me?” Mrs. Izumi was dead earnest now; she seemed to have forgotten Sarah’s presence. “Why can’t you both, for once, follow me?”

The women were silent.

Mrs. Kobayashi cleared her throat. “It’s a lovely idea, Tama-chan,” she said. “But-” She gestured up at the family altar, and they all knew she was referring to the late Shohei. “It would mean abandoning him. Who’d be left to say sutras for him every morning?”

But he’s dead, Sarah thought, and she’s alive. But even as she thought this, she knew it didn’t matter.

“And when Mother dies,” Mrs. Rexford chimed in, “I’ll be there to say sutras for her. That’s the way it has to be. You can’t just throw away history, Tama.”

There was silence as everyone pictured the chain of favoritism stretching forward into the afterlife.

“But don’t you think God understands? He can make provisions. The magnitude of his love…it transcends genealogy.”

“Maybe,” said Mrs. Rexford. “But here on earth it doesn’t work that way. History creates commitments. That means certain people take priority over others. I can’t see any way around it.”

Mrs. Izumi made a moue as if thoughtfully considering this theory, but Sarah saw that her eyes were watery.

chapter 20

Shortly afterward, Mrs. Izumi went away to pay a call on someone she had met through church.

Mrs. Rexford was irritable and restless. “I think I’ll go out,” she told her mother.

“Soh soh, that’s a good idea,” said Mrs. Kobayashi soothingly. “Take a stroll through one of your old haunts.” Mrs. Kobayashi herself did not go in for aimless walks; she left that to the young people.

“I think I’ll go out for an ice. Come on,” Mrs. Rexford told Sarah.

“Are we going to the snack shop?” Sarah asked.

“No. I’m taking you to an old-fashioned teahouse, the kind we used to go to before they came up with those dreadful convenience stores. Can you believe it, Mother? That a child of mine has never eaten shaved ice at Kinjin-ya in the middle of summer?”

“It’s downright un-Japanese,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “You should fix that right away. Run along, then. Go enjoy yourselves.”

They strolled through the lanes, becoming absorbed in the larger outdoor world of cicadas and trees and wind chimes and bicycle bells. Sarah felt her mother’s agitation fade. Smugly, she thought how silly her aunt Tama was to ruin a perfectly nice visit with all that religion.

Her own position, in contrast, felt sweet. How things had changed since America! It seemed ages ago that she had whined because her mother insisted on trimming her sandwich crusts or drawing little sketches on her brown paper lunch bags. Sarah pushed those memories away, ashamed of herself.

And yet-would the changes last? She remembered a science experiment at school, where she had dropped an egg into various liquids. In some, the egg floated to the surface; in others it sank like a stone. What if Japan was the only alchemy in which she could float?

The Kinjin-ya teahouse was small and unpretentious. Sarah had passed it many times on the way to the open-air market but had never gone inside. Its atmosphere was quite different from the modern tea shops downtown. It reminded Sarah of the pickle shop, with its aged wooden walls from when Japan had been a poor country. On one side hung a row of rectangular wooden tablets, one for each item on the menu, bearing the name and price in old-fashioned black brushstrokes. At this time of day the tables were empty; the only other customers were a little boy about Jun’s age and his mother. The boy was spooning his way through a plate of om-rice-an omelette stuffed with ketchup-flavored rice-a children’s favorite since the postwar years.

Mrs. Rexford and Sarah ordered shaved ice topped with a mound of sweetened azuki beans. It came in fluted glass dishes with long-handled spoons. “My generation grew up on this,” Mrs. Rexford said. “Maa, it really takes me back!”

They were silent, savoring the crushed ice and the creamy sweetness of the beans.

“Remember this, remember the way it tastes,” Mrs. Rexford told Sarah. And Sarah did, decades later. Many random experiences would be cemented in her mind by her mother’s phrase “remember this.”

Mrs. Rexford leaned back in her chair, gazing about her with a pleased expression. The seasonal cloth flaps over the open doorway cast a bluish tint on the room. Every so often, a breeze broke apart the heavy flaps and let in a flash of sunlight.

Taking advantage of this peaceful moment, Sarah ventured, “It’s weird now, isn’t it, with Auntie being Christian.”

“Well,” her mother said, “she never had top priority growing up. But it couldn’t be helped-you know how complicated things were back then.”

Sarah nodded.

“It’s an issue in every family, though. Remember that day we had snacks at the Asaki house?”

“Oh right, the bottle of Fanta.”

There had been one large bottle of orange Fanta to share among the three children. Dividing it was quite a project: first the empty glasses were lined up side by side, then each one was filled with the same number of ice cubes, and finally Mrs. Nishimura had poured the Fanta, little by little, until the levels were precisely equal. Momoko and Yashiko seemed familiar with the routine. They had crouched down on their hands and knees so as to be eye-level with the glasses, making sure that neither sibling got a milliliter more than the other.

“You and I are lucky,” said Mrs. Rexford. “Some people never get to come first.” Sarah thought of her aunt Tama making a moue to hide her tears. She thought of her aunt Masako waving from her shadowed gateway as the Kobayashi household strolled past, laughing and chatting, on their way to the bathhouse.

But now for the first time her sympathy was tinged with something hard, an unwillingness to give up her advantage. Her grandmother’s favoritism might not be working in her aunts’ favor, but it was working in hers. For the first time in her life she was blooming. This was the luck of the draw, and she was tired of feeling guilty. In some dim recess of her mind she had begun to feel she deserved it, that fate had recognized her worth and was finally rewarding her.

“I guess there’s no way around it,” Sarah said, echoing her mother’s words from earlier that day.

“I guess not,” said Mrs. Rexford. They were silent, spooning up the last of the azuki beans.

“When you come first in someone’s heart,” Mrs. Rexford said, “it changes you. It literally, chemically changes you. And that stays with you, even after the person’s gone. Remember that.”

Sarah nodded. The idea of chemical change resonated with her, and once again she thought of the eggs floating.

She let out a little sigh of well-being. So this was how it felt to eat shaved ice at Kinjin-ya in the middle of summer. It was pleasant to sit in the path of the old-fashioned fan and feel the air flow over her moist arms and legs, exactly as it must have done when her mother was a girl. She felt curiously relaxed, all her pores open to the world. For the first time she noticed that some defensive part of herself-her habitual readiness to shrink and harden at a moment’s notice-had melted away, leaving a sense of implicit trust in the world. This, she thought, is how it must feel to be a queen bee.

They left the teahouse in excellent spirits.

“That was yummy.” Sarah used the childish word on purpose.

“It was, ne,” agreed Mrs. Rexford.

They walked slowly, in no rush to get home. They took a roundabout route through a neighborhood Sarah had never seen. Some of the houses had old-fashioned thatched roofs instead of the usual gray tile.

“They look like the houses in those history books Grandma sent me,” said Sarah.

“This lane hasn’t changed in generations,” Mrs. Rexford said. “It’s never going to change, I’m sure.”

They passed under the shade of a large ginkgo tree that leaned out over an adobe wall into the lane. The fan-shaped leaves, dangling from thin stems, fluttered and trembled. The meee of cicadas was directly overhead now, sharpened from a mass drone into the loud rings of specific creatures, each with a different pitch, a different location among the branches. Mrs. Rexford paused and lowered her parasol to see if she could spot one. Not finding anything, she lifted her parasol and resumed walking.

“Mama?”

“Hmm?”

“Were you always Grandma’s favorite?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Even before she knew what kind of person you’d turn out to be?”

“Soh, even then. Because I was part of her old life before the war, back when she was happy and in love.”

The lane narrowed and they fell into single file. The dappled shadows danced on the back of Mrs. Rexford’s parasol.

Sarah pictured Shohei’s handsome, unfamiliar face. It was odd to imagine anyone other than her mother holding such power over her grandmother’s heart. That it was a man seemed especially strange. Sarah had grasped early on that while the men in this family were flattered, catered to, and fed extremely well, they were not that important in the scheme of things.

“When your grandfather died,” said Mrs. Rexford, “all her love for him had to go somewhere. So it came to me, all of it. Maybe I turned out the way I did because of that early love. It’s hard to say.”

“So it’s like you piggybacked off of what they had,” Sarah said.

“That’s right. And now you’re piggybacking off of what she and I have. That’s why you’re the favorite grandchild, you see?”

Sarah pondered this. She had always thought love began and ended with the actual person involved. She remembered her mother telling Momoko about emotions fermenting over time and getting blurred together till you couldn’t tell them apart. It seemed that love, too, was blurry when it came to recipients. The remainder of one love could go on to feed the next, like those sourdough starters that American pioneer families had handed down for generations.

“It’s not on your own merits,” said Mrs. Rexford. “Not yet. You reach her through me. Remember that.”

“Okay,” Sarah agreed.

They strolled through the shifting tree shadows of late afternoon. The k’sha k’sha of gravel was loud beneath their feet. The buzz of traffic floated over from some larger street several blocks down. Trailing her fingers along a low wall, Sarah felt its braille of pebbles and straw; she breathed in the scent of sun-warmed adobe. She felt perfectly happy.

They approached two young boys standing under a tree with a plastic insect cage at their feet, staring up at a horned beetle just above their reach. They turned toward Sarah with that look of avid curiosity she knew so well. But they seemed mollified to see her mother was Japanese; she wasn’t, then, a complete outsider.

“Where are your nets, boys?” Mrs. Rexford called out in the friendly tone of a fellow enthusiast. “Do you need me to get that for you?”

The boys gazed with tongue-tied gratitude as she pulled the horned beetle from the bark and transferred it to their plastic cage. “Look at the size of these antlers,” she said. “It’s a real beauty.” Too shy to speak, the boys broke into big foolish grins. Sarah, who had always felt uneasy around small Japanese boys, marveled at how harmless they could be, how sweet.

As they resumed walking abreast Sarah remarked, “Little kids don’t stare as much when I’m with you.” It was the first time she had openly referred to her shame.

“Let them stare,” her mother said breezily.

“Soh ne,” agreed Sarah with her new queen-bee expansiveness. What had she been so afraid of?

Mrs. Rexford gave her daughter an approving glance but said nothing.

Years later Sarah would remember this afternoon for its intensity of color: the gleaming lacquer of the beetle against the bark, the hills rising all around them in a crescendo of green. The parasol cast a rose-colored glow over her mother’s face, drawing Sarah’s eyes to its unfamiliar beauty. Even the air had color, a whitish glow like light refracted through a shoji screen. When she grew older and began falling in love with men, she would experience this same sense of heightened color-although in a weaker form-and see this for what it had been: her first and most powerful romance.

chapter 21

O-bon was almost upon them. It was a three-day festival of reunion, when spirits of dead relatives returned to visit the living. Families were walking en masse to bus stops and train stations that would take them to ancestral gravesites out in the country. This was the time for graveyard maintenance. The fathers carried garden tools; the mothers carried delicate food offerings for the dead (and, if they were old-fashioned, a hearty picnic lunch for the living) discreetly wrapped in silk furoshiki; the children trudged behind with flowers.

As the Kobayashi household ate breakfast, they could hear the crunching of gravel as chattering families passed directly outside, taking shortcuts through the narrow lane. A woman’s voice cried, “A! We forgot the thermos!” It was the last weekend before the holiday. Everyone, it seemed, was heading out to the country.

“They’re getting ready for O-bon,” said little Jun in a sullen voice. Everyone else was silent, chewing.

“I’m afraid we’ve held you back in your preparations,” Mr. Izumi said. He was referring to the housecleaning, for family altars were just as important as graves. “It was thoughtless of us,” he said. Sarah’s heart went out to him. His fine long eyes, slanted ever so slightly downward, gave his face a mournful air.

“Not in the least, Izumi-san!” Mrs. Kobayashi batted the air dismissively, as if to swat away his concern. “The O-bon dinner will be over there”-she gestured toward the Asaki house-“so there’s really nothing for me to do.”

They all knew this was a lie. Housewives cleaned obsessively before a priest’s yearly visit. The priests from So-Zen Temple had already begun their neighborhood rounds, chanting long incantations before each family altar to guide the spirits on their return journey. This was a grueling time for priests, who made back-to-back calls from morning till evening. It was for such occasions, as well as for funerals, that they practiced year round. No priest from So-Zen Temple had yet marred a ceremony with coughing or hoarseness.

“This house is spotless all the time, anyway,” said Mrs. Izumi.

“Mommy,” said Jun, “can’t we stay for O-bon night dancing?”

“No-I already told you. We’re going home tomorrow.”

Another set of footsteps crunched by on the gravel. They heard a small child’s excited voice saying, “…great big rice balls, sprinkled with sesame salt!”

“I don’t envy those people,” said Mr. Kobayashi with well-meaning heartiness. “It’s going to get really hot today.”

“You’re absolutely right, Father-san,” Mrs. Kobayashi replied. “Maybe we should have grilled eel for lunch. It’s good for heat fatigue. Would everyone like that?”

“O-bon, O-bon, it’s almost O-bon,” Jun droned tunelessly.

“Jun-chan, stop that,” said his mother. “No singing at the breakfast table.”

Sarah felt bad for her aunt. In the excitement of the upcoming holiday, the Izumis’ departure would create hardly a ripple.

Afterward, washing dishes at the sink, Mrs. Rexford said, “I can’t believe she went out to pay calls again. On her last day. Who’s she visiting, us or the Jehovah people?”

“It’s all right,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Mother, it’s not all right.”

Having finished the dishes, Mrs. Rexford began wiping the sides of the sink. Mrs. Kobayashi continued to dry, passing the dishes up to Sarah, who was kneeling on the tatami floor of the dining room. The girl stacked each item on the shelves of the floor-level cabinet. Every time she reached into its depths, she breathed in a faint, familiar aroma from her childhood: the wooden damp of freshly washed chopsticks, soy sauce within its cut-glass cruet, condiments such as seven-spice and sesame seeds.

“She won’t even help around the house.” Mrs. Rexford wrung out the dishtowel with an angry twist. “You know what? She hasn’t changed at all. She says long prayers at the table but doesn’t care if our food gets cold while we wait. She sips tea and talks about charity, and meanwhile her aging mother’s slaving away down in the kitchen.”

“Nnn!” protested Mrs. Kobayashi. “‘Aging mother’?!”

Mrs. Rexford refused to be sidetracked. “That kind of hypocrisy earns no respect from me,” she said. “None!” Sarah was fascinated, even excited, to see her mother angry at someone other than Sarah herself.

“Don’t,” said Mrs. Kobayashi quietly. “You know how guilty I feel about her.”

There was a long pause. “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Rexford said.

Afterward Sarah and her mother went to a graveyard in the city to see the O-bon decorations. The somber headstones were transformed by sasaki grass, fruit and flower offerings, and branches of umbrella pine; the crumbling baby Buddhas were resplendent in new red bibs. White threads of incense wavered up by the dozen, hovering in the humid air like ghostly forms bending over their own headstones.

“We’ll visit our own graveyard after your aunt and uncle leave,” Mrs. Rexford told Sarah. “It won’t be as crowded as this one, because it’s out in the country. But it’ll be lovely too in a different way.”

Lately, with Mrs. Izumi away so much, Sarah and her mother had been going out alone. Sometimes they visited a little-known restaurant whose only item on the menu was dumplings from a secret family recipe handed down since the Momoyama era. Once they visited the Gion district to look at geishas. But mostly they wandered through out-of-the-way haunts from Mrs. Rexford’s youth. They strolled past the tennis courts of her old high school or lingered in a neglected children’s park on the bank of the Kamo River. Mrs. Rexford told stories of her youth, and Sarah listened with an attentiveness she had never shown back home.

When they arrived home, Mrs. Izumi’s and Jun’s shoes were already lined up in the vestibule. “Welcome home!” called Jun’s treble voice from the family room. He was sitting at the table with his hands curled around a cold glass of sweet, tangy rice Calpis. “Mommy’s changing her clothes,” he said.

Sarah pulled down some blue-and-white floor cushions from the stack in the corner. The electric fan on the floor whirred gently, swiveling back and forth like a spectator at a tennis game.

Mrs. Rexford soon entered, followed by Mrs. Kobayashi bearing a tray with a large Calpis bottle and glasses. “The men went across the lane to see Uncle,” she said. The Asaki house had already finished its gravesite duties.

When everyone except Mrs. Izumi was settled, Mrs. Kobayashi said, “So did you have fun today, Jun-chan? Did you meet some nice people?”

Jun nodded, taking a noisy gulp of his drink.

“What did you all talk about?” Sarah asked curiously.

“Heaven.”

“Oh! That sounds nice.”

Jun nodded again, pleased to be the center of attention. “We’re all going there,” he said, as if discussing an upcoming vacation. Then, remembering something important, he turned to his grandmother with an anxious look. “Grandma,” he said, “Mommy says you don’t want to go to heaven with us.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to, Jun-chan. But there are other reasons, you see.”

“Grandma, they told me I should ask you to come.” He widened his eyes, the whites so babyishly clear they had a bluish cast. “Because I don’t want you to go to hell, Grandma.”

“I’ll be just fine, dear. There’s no need for you to worry.”

“No, Grandma. Listen!” Jun’s brow puckered with the effort of trying to make her understand. “Listen! Hell is a really, really scary place. You won’t like it there. I don’t want you to go there, Grandma.”

Mrs. Kobayashi said nothing. She looked distressed; the lines around her mouth deepened until they looked like parentheses. She reached out helplessly and stroked her grandson’s crew cut.

Jun seemed baffled by his grandmother’s lack of sense. “How come you don’t want to go with us?” he persisted.

By this time Mrs. Izumi had returned and was standing in the doorway, watching her mother’s predicament with a smug expression on her face.

Mrs. Rexford looked over at her sister, and her lips compressed. A mighty force seemed to rise up in her, charging the room like air before a storm. Sarah had never seen this brutal, avenging side of her mother; back home, she hadn’t defended anyone but herself. Sarah remembered the stories of her mother as a child, protecting the weak on the playground.

“Raise your child any way you want,” Mrs. Rexford said. Her voice, though quiet, had such intensity and force that Sarah wondered for one crazy moment if her mother would stand up and hit her sister the way she had when they were children. “Raise him any way you want, but don’t you dare use him to hurt my mother.”

The sisters stared at each other for several minutes.

Then, surprisingly, Mrs. Rexford’s face contorted. “Mother,” she said, and suddenly she was crying.

Sarah and her aunt exchanged a glance of surprise and concern.

Mrs. Kobayashi got up and went over to kneel beside her daughter, running her hand up and down her back. “There, there,” she consoled, her face twisting in sympathy. “Shhh, now.”

Sarah felt a terrible sickness in her stomach. This was how her mother must have felt as a child.

Mrs. Rexford turned her face away from them, tensing her shoulders in an effort to stop her sobs.

At this point, Sarah and her aunt both remembered little Jun, who was sitting rapt, his mouth open with curiosity.

“I’ll take him,” Sarah whispered to her aunt. She stood up and held out her hand to the boy. “Come on, Jun-chan.”

“Big Sister, how come Aunt Mama’s crying?”

“I’ll tell you later. Let’s go, now.”

As she led him out of the room, she heard her aunt saying in a small, stunned voice, “Big Sister, I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, both of you,” said Mrs. Kobayashi’s voice. “It’s all right, now.”

As Sarah passed through the dining room to the opposite end of the house, she came face-to-face with her grandfather. He must have come home early in order to get some work done. Like Sarah, he was heading for the opposite end of the house, with a sketch pad in one hand and a cup of cold tea in the other. He must have heard part of the women’s conversation, but it was hard to tell his reaction.

“Can we come watch you work, Grandpa?” she asked.

“Sure, sure,” he said, smiling.

Still holding Jun’s hand, Sarah followed her grandfather down the hallway to his accustomed spot on the garden veranda. Even in her agitation, she was aware of the pleasant coolness of varnished wood under her bare feet. The garden side of the house had an austere quality-perhaps it was the earthen walls or the formality of the dark wood-that required a certain mental adjustment, like entering a museum from a busy street.

Jun, active as always, immediately clambered down onto a pair of gardening sandals and trotted into the garden. Squatting down, he picked up an empty cicada shell. “Look, Big Sister! Come look what I found!” he cried, already forgetting about his Aunt Mama in the other room. Sarah found another pair of gardening sandals and climbed down after him.

They crouched together, searching for more cicada shells. Eventually Mrs. Izumi came out and joined her father on the veranda.

The two adults sat for a while in silence. Mr. Kobayashi lit a cigarette, and its scent wafted out into the afternoon air like a rich, comforting incense.

He cleared his throat and said, “It’s no use trying to change them, you know.” He spoke gruffly, for he knew he was intruding into women’s territory.

“I know,” Mrs. Izumi replied, a bit shortly. Again they were silent.

Sarah knew her aunt Tama had been his favorite as a child. The family albums were full of photographs of little Tama beaming at the camera, her gap-toothed smile playing up to her father behind the lens. Being his favorite should have been enough for her. But Sarah understood why it wasn’t; nothing else compared with the brightness that was her grandmother and mother.

“It runs too deep,” Mr. Kobayashi said, and an echo of private remembrance gave his words a strange resonance.

“I know,” Mrs. Izumi said again.

Sarah glanced over at her aunt. There was an uncharacteristic stillness about her, as if her coquettish energy had finally run out.

chapter 22

In the lull of late afternoon, Sarah knelt before the vanity mirror and practiced pressing her lips together the way her mother had done. Don’t you dare use him to hurt my mother. She felt a little thrill as her face, with its pointy Caucasian features, became transformed with authority and passion.

She was alone in the house, with nothing to do. The men had taken Jun to a baseball game. Her grandmother had gone to the open-air market at this uncharacteristically late hour to pick up something for dinner. “You mind the house,” she had told Sarah, “in case any of them come back.”

Mrs. Rexford and Mrs. Izumi had gone somewhere together. Wherever they were, Sarah knew, her mother would be treating her little sister with utmost tenderness. She knew this from experience; after a fight, her mother always channeled her heightened emotions into intimate revelations or optimistic lectures. Sarah never admitted it, but those winding-down sessions made her feel cleansed and very close to her mother.

She fiddled with the brushes on the vanity. Kneeling on the tatami floor, she slid open the drawer and rummaged halfheartedly through its contents: Shiseido cosmetics, bathhouse tokens, an old-fashioned wooden ear cleaner.

For the first time she missed Momoko and Yashiko. She hadn’t seen much of them since the Izumis arrived. They were being kept at home, out of everyone’s way, for traditional women all understood the strain of hosting an in-law.

As matriarch of the Kobayashi clan, it was in Mrs. Asaki’s interest to support her sister-in-law. So the Asaki house was always open for company, as a sort of second home where the adults could go (although Mrs. Kobayashi never did) for a conversational change of pace. The children were encouraged to play there, and Jun visited often-he was fond of the snack tins under Mrs. Nishimura’s table.

Sarah thought back to those innocent hours she had spent playing at the Asaki house, safe from adult issues that didn’t concern her. Ever since she joined the ranks of her mother and grandmother, she had left behind that world of glowing shoji screens and warm tatami mats, the leaf-filtered light in the kitchen and crackers in tin boxes. And she couldn’t go back. She realized this with a twinge of sadness; it was like that magic land in Peter Pan, out of reach to children who had grown up. Not that anything was keeping her from going. But at this point it was too much trouble: thinking ahead to keep Momoko from being jealous, seeing her aunt Masako’s gentle face.

She thought of the times she had run freely to her aunt Tama as a child. “Where are you going?” she would say. “Take me with you.” She couldn’t imagine doing that now. It wouldn’t be right somehow, after the strolls she had taken with her mother-it would feel like a betrayal.

She glanced out through the open partitions at the laundry area, with its empty poles and lines. For the first time she noticed that summer had passed its peak; the sunlight had changed from hazy white to deep gold, almost amber. The late afternoon sun angled down in dust-moted shafts, reminding Sarah of stained glass. Accustomed to California sun, she was strangely affected by this aged, regretful light of a foreign longitude.

The kitchen door rolled open. Mrs. Kobayashi called out, “Tadaima! I’m home!”

“Welcome back!” Sarah called. She could hear the icebox door opening and closing in the kitchen. This was comforting after the strange, sad light outside.

By the time Sarah descended into the kitchen, her grandmother was standing at the counter and unwrapping newspaper from an enormous bundle of garlic shoots. A plate of thinly sliced raw beef lay nearby, its dark red an appealing contrast to the green of the shoots. As always, her spirits lifted at the sight of food.

“Can I help, Oba-chan?” she asked. Helping with the cooking was normally her mother’s job, not hers. Since only two people could work comfortably in the kitchen at one time, the women took advantage of this legitimate excuse to hold hushed, private conversations. “Put on your apron, Yo-chan,” Sarah occasionally heard her grandmother say, as if her daughter were still a child. “Yo-chan, are you holding your knife right?” Both women seemed to enjoy this.

“Maa, that’s very kind,” Mrs. Kobayashi now said. “Why don’t you get me the konnyaku and the fu out of the icebox. But put on an apron first.”

Sarah took down one of the aprons hanging from a nail on the wooden post. She tied the strings behind her with quick, efficient jerks the way her mother always did. It was like stepping into her mother’s body, and suddenly she felt shy.

Sarah’s relationship with her grandmother wasn’t as personal as her relationship with her mother. Since the two adults were so close, she was rarely alone with her grandmother. The girl loved her wholeheartedly but in the uncomplicated way of a child.

Emptying the gelatinous strands of konnyaku into a colander, she asked, “Did Mama used to cry like that when she was a girl?”

“No. Not at all. She was quiet…but you always sensed how protective she was, how strongly she felt things. I’m still surprised I gave birth to someone like that. Do you know the story of Benkei?”

Sarah nodded. Her mother had read her the story out of one of the books her grandmother had sent her. Benkei was a legendary vassal warrior, greatly feared for his brute strength and sword skills. He had earned a place in history for his remarkable allegiance to his lord, Yoshitsune. This allegiance had lasted right up to their deaths, when the two of them were cornered by enemies. Yoshitsune had died first, taking his own life. Benkei, mortally wounded from an arrow, stuck his sword into the ground and expired on it. From a distance his propped-up corpse seemed to be in a stance of readiness, so their foes were afraid to come any closer. “Even in death,” her mother had told her, “he protected his master. Nothing’s more admirable than that kind of loyalty.”

“There must have been a lot of Benkei in Mama,” said Sarah.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Kobayashi, “and it meant the world to me.” They paused while Sarah rinsed the konnyaku under the faucet and her grandmother chopped the chives with loud thuds of the knife against the cutting board.

“It was a hard time,” Mrs. Kobayashi finally said. “I’d lost my husband. I’d lost my newborn child. It felt like everyone was against me.”

“Except for Mama.”

“Except for your mama. Sometimes I used to go to the park where she was playing. And I’d beckon her over and slip a little something in her pocket. Like a bit of sweet potato, or a tiny rice ball with a pinch of umeboshi in the middle. The food was still rationed back then. Things were really tight.” She paused in her work, remembering.

“There just wasn’t enough,” she said, “for the other children.”

Perhaps to atone for today’s unpleasantness, or perhaps to distract the family from this evening’s O-bon foot traffic, Mrs. Kobayashi served sukiyaki for dinner. It was an odd choice. Sukiyaki was a winter dish, suggestive of old-world country folk huddled around a common pot. Setting it up required some effort. A gas hose had to be retrieved from storage. One end was attached to a wall outlet, the other end to a range built into the dining table (modern Japanese tables came equipped with such accessories). On this range, a shallow pan was kept simmering throughout the meal. They dropped in raw ingredients from a nearby platter, leaning over the steam to monitor for doneness before lifting it out into their private bowls.

“It’s kind of festive, cooking right at the table!” Sarah said.

“That’s why people eat sukiyaki at celebrations,” replied her mother.

“Let’s not worry about what’s seasonal,” Mrs. Kobayashi said to everyone at the dinner table. “With all of you living so far away, who knows when you’ll have another chance to taste your grandma’s sukiyaki?” Her husband gave a comical groan, fanning himself exaggeratedly. But he was quick to tuck in. The two men cracked one egg after another into their private dipping bowls. Little Jun, energized from his outing, recounted the baseball game in loud, happy detail.

“And then he hit a home run!” he said. “Pow!” He was wearing a new red baseball cap jammed on top of his old blue one. The men, too, seemed stimulated by their outing. They actually carried the conversation at the dinner table for a change, pausing every so often to wipe sweat from their faces with cotton handkerchiefs. Mrs. Kobayashi refilled their glasses with cold Kirin beer.

All of this, enhanced by the spectacle of sukiyaki bubbling on the table in the middle of summer, made for an unusually merry evening. Seven pairs of chopsticks dipped in and out of the pan like birds’ beaks, pulling out meat, onions, garlic shoots, tofu, konnyaku-all gleaming with fat and sugared soy sauce. Christianity was never mentioned. No one noticed the neighbors returning from graveyard duty, their footsteps slow and heavy on the gravel. By some magic force everyone’s tension had lifted, and the entire table seemed to float on a cloud of well-being.

As they ate, Sarah surreptitiously watched her mother and aunt. But they looked relaxed, even happy. They said little, laughing appreciatively at the men, who were joking about getting heatstroke at the dinner table. Mrs. Kobayashi pretended to be insulted, and the men grinned at her with their lean, handsome faces.

Mrs. Izumi lifted the teapot and refilled her big sister’s cup in an intimate gesture, accidentally spilling some drops in the process. Mrs. Rexford wiped them away with an ill-mannered swipe of her finger, glancing furtively at her mother as she did so. Mrs. Kobayashi didn’t notice. Both sisters giggled under their breath like naughty children.

Sarah felt sorry for her cousins, who were missing this dinner. Thinking of them reminded her of that strange regret she had felt this afternoon, when she knew she could never rejoin their world. She wondered if her mother had also known this feeling.

It was a fleeting thought in an otherwise golden hour. But in years to come, it would sadden her to remember two grown sisters giggling behind their mother’s back like the partners in crime they had never been.