The Favorites

chapter 37

The first day back in her grandmother’s house gave Sarah a sense of wavering in time. Her American self dropped away. In its place, long-forgotten former selves came swimming up from the depths: the little girl who had attended school in Japan, the fourteen-year-old who had lived here one summer, the various older selves she had been on subsequent visits. She was twenty-four years old. She had passed the CPA exam and joined the tax department of a multinational corporation.

“This soup is delicious,” she said. “Creamy. Very delicate.”

Mrs. Kobayashi nodded. “I changed the ratio of white miso to red. That way it won’t interfere with the flavor of the squash.”

“Look at these colors.” Sarah held out her bowl at arm’s length, admiring the overall effect. “So nice and autumnal. The orange of the squash, the speckled brown of the mountain potato…”

“Against the red lacquer of the bowl,” said her grandmother proudly.

“A perfect combination.”

Sarah returned the bowl to its proper position in the palm of her left hand.

“No one makes breakfasts like this anymore,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. She nodded at the array of side dishes: eel omelette, umeboshi, glazed kelp and beans. “Over at Granny’s house, they sometimes eat their rice with nothing but miso soup and fried eggs. Momoko told me.”

“Not very satisfying,” said Sarah, forgetting that her usual breakfast in America was nothing but cereal and a banana.

They ate contentedly.

Sarah gazed about at the wooden posts and fusuma panels of her childhood. She still half expected to hear her grandfather’s hammer tap-tapping in the workroom.

“It’s quiet with him gone, ne,” she said. Mr. Kobayashi had died of a heart attack two years ago. Although his loss paled in comparison with that of her parents, Sarah had loved her grandfather and his death had been a shock.

“Yes, it’s hard to get used to. It’s strange living alone.”

Sarah remembered his affectionate, if clumsy, presents: boxes of caramels for her, packets of Japanese radish seeds for her mother, a bottle of processed seaweed paste (“to put on your bread when you get home”) or some other impractical thing for them to take home to America.

“Granny Asaki visited me the week he died-did I ever tell you? You’d gone home by then.”

Sarah shook her head.

“She rang the bell at the visitor gate. I’m thinking, what’s all this? Then she seats herself in the parlor and bows her head to the floor, over and over. She says, ‘You were a fine wife. He didn’t deserve you. It’s humbled me all these years, the way you worked so hard without complaining.’”

“How lovely,” said Sarah. “I adore Japanese formality.”

Mrs. Kobayashi snorted. “Well, it’s true. I gave him decades of exemplary service. It was for my own self-respect.” Then her voice softened. “He appreciated it near the end, though. He used to look up from his plate and say, all gruff and embarrassed, ‘You were always good to me. Thank you.’”

Sarah nodded.

“I did more than enough for the man,” her grandmother said briskly. “I have no regrets.”

“Do you ever dream about him?”

“Not really. Do you?”

“No. I still dream about my parents, though. I keep forgetting they’re dead. You’d think after six years, it would soak through to my subconscious.”

Her grandmother, chewing, nodded with interest and encouragement.

“It’s odd,” said Sarah, “that they’re so fresh in my dreams. It’s like that part of my brain is frozen in time.”

“Yes, the human brain is very mysterious.”

Sarah had thought the same thing ten years ago, when the burbling of pigeons brought back her eight-year-old self.

“Where are the pigeons?” she said now. “I don’t hear any.”

“Aaa, they’re all gone. The temple ban finally had its effect.”

They ate silently. Sarah’s thoughts returned to her grandfather. It was a pity that as she grew into womanhood, the scrim separating adult and child had never lifted between them as it had with her grandmother. Now he was gone, and his inner life would always be a mystery. He must have been lonely, she thought. He must have had love to give, though much of it had gone unclaimed.

chapter 38

Sarah and her grandmother were walking to the open-air market. The morning was hushed and gray, absorbing sound and turning the lanes into a silent movie.

“Oh, that smell!” she cried, breathing in the long-forgotten aroma of burning leaves. Back home in California, backyard fires were against the law.

“Soh, it’s that time of year,” agreed her grandmother, as if humoring a child.

This was the first time Sarah had visited in November. The pungent smell took her far back in time, to her kindergarten days in the Kyoto hills. During recess their teacher had tended a small fire in the center of the playground and raked out indigenous sweet potatoes, blistered and blackened, for the children’s afternoon snack.

They approached Murasaki Boulevard and crossed the intersection. “A! A!” Mrs. Kobayashi exclaimed. “Good thing I remembered! Remind me, if I forget, to buy shiso leaves. You know, to wrap the sashimi in.”

The open-air market had changed since the seventies. There was a new supermarket, where they bought a small bundle of shiso leaves. The store wasn’t as big as the supermarkets in California; the aisles were too narrow for shopping carts. But it was just as well, for once-a-week shopping was still an alien concept for Ueno women. The supermarket was popular for its cheap produce, mass-farmed and shipped in from distant places. Women had stopped buying locally grown vegetables; they were too expensive during the economic recession. Vendor carts were a pleasant rarity. The sun-browned farmers in their old-fashioned garb seemed like relics from another era.

“This street’s so quiet!” said Sarah. Vendors no longer hawked their wares with loud, exuberant bellows. Cash registers had replaced abacuses and jingling money bags.

“Remember how quiet the weavers’ alley was just now?” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “That’s the way it was in wartime, when I was a young woman.”

Sarah remembered her mother’s comment about looms moving in tandem with the stock market. “It’s odd,” she said, “that even in this bad economy, there’re all these new buildings. So many things changing.”

“Not everyone’s hurting, I guess.”

They approached the “expensive” fish store. The open-air market had two seafood stores: the expensive place with the good-quality seafood, and the cheap place with affordable seafood, mostly imported.

“You’re visiting at the perfect time,” her grandmother told her. “The fish right now, the big heavy cold-current ones, they’re at their fattiest this time of year. Sashimi is at its prime!”

Sarah noticed there were no customers in line. Plenty of people were bending over the crushed-ice display, but no one was buying.

One of the vendors, a shrewd older woman, came out from behind the counter to show Mrs. Kobayashi her most expensive items. “Madam!” she said by way of greeting. “After your granddaughter goes home to America you’ll be kicking yourself, with all due respect, for not letting her taste this highest-quality roe! At its absolute prime, madam, this time of year!” She waited, with a complacent smile, as Mrs. Kobayashi wavered. Reaching out a hand, she let it hover dramatically over a display of enormous scallops. “Sashimi grade,” she said simply. “Flown in a few hours ago from Hokkaido.”

It occurred to Sarah that she hadn’t heard her grandmother bargain in a long time. That practice must have gone out of style.

In no time at all, the woman was wrapping up their fatty sashimi plus several other unplanned purchases. She rang up the total on a cash register. “It’ll be good for the young miss,” she reassured Mrs. Kobayashi, “to eat good-quality seafood prepared properly in her granny’s kitchen. In America ”-her eyes slid over in Sarah’s direction-“those people eat their fish cooked in vegetable oil.”

Sarah laughed, tickled by her expert salesmanship. The vendor responded with a homey smile, revealing a gold tooth.

“You have your mother’s laugh, don’t you,” she said wonderingly. “Startles me every time, miss, coming from that American face.”

Sarah, who had long ago outgrown her insecurity over her Caucasian features, could appreciate this paradox. “She’s right, you know,” she told her grandmother as they walked away. “I don’t resemble anyone on my Japanese side.”

“You have lots of family characteristics,” Mrs. Kobayashi said firmly. She counted them on her fingers: a widow’s peak, a thumb that joined her hand at exactly the same angle that her grandfather Shohei’s had, a floating cyst on her neck that had been passed down through several generations of Kobayashis.

“And let’s not forget your voice.” Sarah’s voice was identical to her mother’s. In the early days, whenever Sarah said “moshi moshi” over the telephone, Mrs. Kobayashi had felt a wild lurch of hope that her daughter’s death had all been a big mistake.

“And on top of all that,” the old woman concluded, “you have the same open presence your mother and your grandfather had.”

Sarah pondered this as they turned homeward. She wondered what her grandfather Shohei would think if he could see them now: an unlikely pair! She imagined his shock and bewilderment at seeing his own wife walking alongside an American, channeling to her all the love that had once gone to him.

Walking abreast, they turned off the main street. They passed the Kinjin-ya teahouse and entered a narrow residential lane that headed west toward So-Zen Temple. On Sarah’s last visit this lane had been gravel; now it was paved. Their shoes made flat slapping sounds against the blacktop, and Sarah missed the gentle k’sha k’sha that had so often reminded her of walking on new-fallen snow.

The sun broke through briefly, its pale light slanting tentatively into the lane. Many of the rickety doors had been replaced by sturdier models with slats of brown plastic instead of traditional wood. One corner house had been torn down altogether and replaced with a Western-style model home, complete with white aluminum siding and a door that opened with a knob. Hanging from the knocker was a painted wooden cutout of a puppy, holding in its smiling mouth a nameplate spelling out THE MATSUDAS in English letters.

A bicycle bell tinged behind them. They backed off to the side, careful not to bump into a motor scooter parked beside one of the doors. A straight-backed housewife rode past with a bow of thanks, her wire basket filled with newspaper-wrapped groceries.

“We’ll have this sashimi for lunch, with hot rice,” Mrs. Kobayashi said as they resumed walking abreast. “You’re not here for very long, so we need to plan the menu carefully. We can’t afford to let a single meal go to waste.” Energized by this task before her, she walked briskly. “Do you have any cravings?” she said. “If you do, tell me now.”

“Grandma?” Sarah asked. “Whatever happened to the little lane that hadn’t changed in generations?” That summer day, when she and her mother had strolled home after eating azuki ice, already belonged to a different lifetime. “You know, the lane with the thatched roofs?”

Mrs. Kobayashi gave a short, puzzled laugh as Sarah described it to her.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “They’ve torn a lot of those down.” Then she suddenly stopped short. “Sarah-chan,” she said, “do you remember if we locked the kitchen door when we left?”

A few more years, Sarah thought, and these lanes would be unrecognizable. She imagined a day in the future, perhaps when her grandmother was gone, when she might walk through these lanes with her own daughter-a child with even less Japanese blood than she. And a certain quality of reproach in the slant of sunlight would remind her with a pang, as it did now, of her mother’s confident voice saying, “It’s never going to change, I’m sure.”

“Once, when I was a girl,” Sarah would tell her daughter, gripping her hand tightly, “I walked these lanes just like you, with my own mother.” Saying these inadequate words, she would sense keenly how much fell away with time, how lives intersected but only briefly.

“Thank goodness I remembered the shiso leaves,” Mrs. Kobayashi said now, leaning over and peering into Sarah’s string bag. “When you were little you refused to eat your sashimi and rice without it, remember? Maa, I never saw such a particular child!”

“That wasn’t me, Grandma,” Sarah said. “That was Mama.”

“Oh…” Mrs. Kobayashi was silent for a moment. “Well, that would make more sense, ne,” she said finally. “Poor thing. Autumn hiramasa was her favorite. But we couldn’t afford it during the postwar years. Then just when things got better and she could have eaten her fill, she moved away…”

Sarah looked over at the old woman beside her. Mixed in with her sympathy was a certain satisfaction: here was someone who still mourned, who still hurt deeply and had not forgotten.

“Grandma,” she said, in the gentle tone she had often heard her mother use. “There’s no use thinking like that. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

Mrs. Kobayashi quickened her pace, as she sometimes did when she was feeling emotional. “People don’t always get the luxury of timing,” she said.

chapter 39

One day Sarah noticed that her grandmother had bought more roasted eels than the two of them could eat.

“Do you want me to take some over to Auntie’s?” she asked.

“No, no. There isn’t enough for everyone in that house. This isn’t cheap, you know.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “The extra portion’s for your auntie’s anemia. What I do, ne, is flag her down sometimes when she passes by the kitchen door. I sneak her in for a quick bite, and no one’s the wiser. Or sometimes I give her liver-you know, the kind I always make for you with ginger and soy sauce. Of course it’s a secret.”

This was the first Sarah had heard of her grandmother keeping secrets with anyone but her mother and herself.

A few days later, when she complimented her grandmother on the miniature rosebush in the garden, she learned it had been a gift from Mrs. Nishimura.

“Oh…” She was puzzled. The two houses sometimes exchanged cuttings, but never brand-new plants from the nursery. That had been Mrs. Rexford’s style-many times, after one of her outings, she would come home saying, “Mother, look!” and holding out a pot of bluebells or fragrant jasmine.

“Oh,” Sarah said again. “Well, that was really nice of her.”

It occurred to her that her mother’s name had been coming up in conversation much less than it used to.

One night the two women were sitting at the kotatsu in the family room. The kotatsu was a small low table with an electric heater attached to its underside, and a heavy quilted cover that extended down to the floor and covered their laps. Like most traditional homes in this neighborhood, the Kobayashi house had no central heating. One stayed warm by huddling around a kotatsu while chatting or watching television. Sometimes, since it was just the two of them, Mrs. Kobayashi and Sarah ate their meals there as well.

“You two had a spat?” Sarah was saying. “You’re joking!”

“It was completely one-sided,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “We were talking on the phone about something…I can’t even remember what…then all of a sudden, she got upset and said, ‘You never wanted me anyway!’ And she hung up.”

“What!”

“I know! I couldn’t believe my ears. She’s never said anything like that in her entire life.”

“So what happened?”

“I rushed over there. I didn’t even stop to think. I just knew I could never live with myself if I didn’t make it right. I said to her, ‘I’ve done a terrible thing to you.’ God knows where Granny was that whole time! And I told her, ‘There hasn’t been a day in all these years I haven’t regretted it.’” Mrs. Kobayashi nodded, her eyes watering at the memory. “It was surreal, like jumping off a cliff. But you know how much I’ve always wanted to tell her that.”

“I know.” Sarah remembered her grandmother saying to her mother, “I wish I knew if deep down, behind that face, she’s all right. I wonder if deep down, she hates me.”

“Your aunt was such a reserved girl,” Mrs. Kobayashi said now. “There was that coolness about her, not like your mother or your aunt Tama. But now she’s starting to blossom. Little by little, she’s turning into the person she was always meant to be.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

“Well, it might be something only a mother notices.”

Just then, someone tapped on the kitchen door.

“Who could that be, so late?” Mrs. Kobayashi murmured.

It was Yashiko on her way home from her college prep session. She couldn’t stay, she told them. She had brought a box of piping-hot octopus balls, a classic cold-weather snack. “Mother said to pick these up for Aunt Mama,” she said, referring to the tradition of offering the deceased’s favorite foods at the family altar. “I have to run-I’m late for dinner!”

This was typical of Mrs. Nishimura’s thoughtfulness. She remembered little things, like how her big sister used to eat these octopus balls standing up like a man, in front of the vendor cart with its red cotton flaps. Even now, on winter nights, that same old-fashioned cart set up shop in the same place: the sidewalk next to the vermilion gateposts of Umeya Shrine. Octopus balls were a nighttime commodity, geared toward college students or salarymen on their way home from work. Since Mrs. Kobayashi never ventured out after sunset and discouraged Sarah from doing so as well, Mrs. Nishimura’s gesture was doubly considerate.

After Yashiko hurried home to her dinner, Mrs. Kobayashi carried the box directly to the altar. She lit the incense, struck the gong, and with a good-humored “Eat up, Yo-chan!” placed the Styrofoam box on the slide-out shelf beneath the altar. Then the two women, having finished their own dinner several hours ago, sat back down at the kotatsu. After a suitable amount of time, Sarah got up and retrieved the box from the altar. The contents were still hot. The balls of dough were generously studded with octopus chunks, green onions, and pickled red ginger; their tops were drizzled with savory sauce and dried bonito flakes and green seaweed powder. Mrs. Kobayashi took one but ate only half. “You have a young person’s digestion, so you might as well eat it all,” she said, pushing the box toward Sarah. “They’ll be no good once they get cold.”

Sarah began working her way through the octopus balls, spearing them one by one with a toothpick. “So why now, do you think?” she asked, returning to their earlier conversation.

“Saa…who knows? Strange things happen to women in middle age. Emotions rise up from quiet places. They realize life is short, and it makes them act differently.”

They were silent.

“Can I tell you something?” Having broached this subject, her grandmother seemed eager to keep on talking. “A few years back-right before your grandpa had his heart attack-we ran into each other at the open-air market. She introduced me to someone she knew. And you know what she said?” Mrs. Kobayashi paused dramatically. “She said, ‘This is my mother.’”

Sarah speared another octopus ball and said nothing.

“She said, ‘This is my mother,’” Mrs. Kobayashi repeated. “As cool as a cucumber, right in public. She said, ‘This is my mother.’”

Sarah looked up and saw her grandmother’s face transformed with happiness and wonderment. Something about that expression reminded her of her own mother, long ago, when they had held hands.

“I never thought I’d live to see it!” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “She was always such a cool little girl, she could never say what she felt…and there she was, saying, ‘This is my mother.’ Right in public.”

Sarah’s vague unease now funneled into a sinking feeling in her stomach. She didn’t fully understand it, but its physical effect was real.

“I’m glad for you both,” she said gently. “It’s very lovely, almost like a romance.”

“I know, don’t you think so? Listen to this. On Mother’s Day I found a little bouquet of hand-picked violets in the milk delivery box. There wasn’t any note. But I knew it was her.”

“Well,” said Sarah, “I guess it’s a good thing Auntie doesn’t hate you after all.” She took a hard pleasure in being so direct. Then she was instantly ashamed of herself.

But her grandmother didn’t seem to notice. “I’m sure her feelings are complicated. But it’s the start of something, don’t you think? It’s more than I ever expected.”

Sarah nodded, pulling her legs out from under the heated quilt. “Let me go snuff out that incense,” she said, “before I forget.”

She walked over to the altar. She stood there for a moment, looking at the aged, indecipherable tablets and at her mother’s tablet, still brand-new. She was reminded of her early childhood when she would stand in this very spot, sulking or feeling sorry for herself after some imagined slight. She remembered how she had consoled herself by peering into this alternate world, inhaling the odor of incense and thinking fiercely that dead people were nicer than the living.

After a while she snuffed out the incense sticks and swung shut the black lacquered panels for the night. For the first time in years, she sensed her mother was gone-truly, finally gone.

chapter 40

Now that Mrs. Kobayashi belonged to the ranks of the elderly, she patronized the bathhouse as soon as it opened: 3:30 P.M. on the dot. The other old women in the neighborhood were just as punctual. If they arrived even an hour or two later-Sarah remembered this from her own childhood-the clientele would be completely different. There would be young housewives. There would be small children with flushed faces, immersed in the scalding water bearable only to a Japanese adult, their treble voices counting to one hundred as fast as they could go.

Within this group of old-timers, Mrs. Rexford’s legacy lived on. Naked, dripping women still sighed by way of a conversation opener, “Such a pity, ne-”

Sarah, seated on a plastic stool, was washing her grandmother’s back. Proper etiquette required a person to be fully scrubbed and rinsed before entering a communal bath.

“Ara, how nice,” said a bent old woman, pattering past on her way to the bathing area.

Sarah and her grandmother, still seated, smiled and returned her half-bow.

She resumed her gentle soaping. At first, she had often pretended it was her mother’s back she was washing. It had eased her ache to give her grandmother the tenderness she had never given her mother. Even now, she couldn’t forgive herself for the way she had acted as a child.

After their summer in Japan, things had improved. It wasn’t noticeable at first, for their closeness fell away in America. But as the months passed, that indefinable chemical change within Sarah asserted itself. She still struggled with her mother for freedoms and privileges, but their arguments weren’t as frequent or as personal. For Sarah had seen her mother at her strongest and most admired, and her mother knew she had.

Their arguments became less about Sarah wanting to fit in with her peers, and more about her wanting to try new experiences-something that her mother could understand. Over time, her outsider anxiety dropped away altogether, giving her much more in common with her mother. This took years, of course, and Mrs. Rexford didn’t live to see the full effect. But before her death there had been the start of a true womanly friendship between them. For the first time, Sarah had looked into the future and seen the full-fledged bond theirs would become.

She knew this now: her relationship with her mother hadn’t been a bad one. But back then, the only yardstick they had was the closeness between her mother and her grandmother. It was a source of regret for Sarah, as she knew it had been for her mother, than they hadn’t been able to replicate it.

“Look!” said Mrs. Kobayashi. She was pointing down at their feet on the tiles. “You and I have the same toes.” It was true; the first three toes of Mrs. Kobayashi’s feet were all the same length, just like Sarah’s.

“Maa, she takes after her grandma!” a nearby bather commented kindly. It touched Sarah to think of her grandmother eyeing her body so discreetly, so hopefully, searching for the smallest of connections.

They rinsed under the showerhead, then walked over to the bathing area. The enormous tub took up the entire room; through the heavy steam, they could glimpse several heads rising from the surface of the turquoise water. Echoes bounced off the high domed ceiling. On the other side of the tall dividing wall, they could hear the occasional burst of male voices.

They straddled the side of the pool-like tub and stepped into the steaming water. Gritting her teeth to keep from yelping, Sarah descended the steps until the hot water was up to her neck.

“Aaa…,” sighed Mrs. Kobayashi, holding a soaked washcloth up to her cheek in order to absorb even more heat. “Nothing feels more luxurious than soaking in an old-fashioned communal bath.”

“Isn’t that the truth, madam,” agreed a woman several meters away. “Those new houses with the baths added on, they have such tiny little tubs. There’s no way you can get the water truly hot, like it is here.”

“One of my daughters lives in a house with a private tub,” Mrs. Kobayashi told her. “She’s never bathed here, even though she passes by every day on her way to the market. Such a pity. I often think how much she’d enjoy it here.”

Sarah felt a flash of anger. This was her mother’s special place, not her aunt’s. With a queer feeling in her stomach, she remembered how loyal her mother had been, as loyal as Benkei. Don’t you dare hurt my mother, she had said. And she had cried…

Now an unfamiliar woman, treading water with her hands, made her way over to Mrs. Kobayashi. “This must be Yo-chan’s daughter?” She turned to Sarah, her face flushed from the heat. “Your mother,” she said, “used to light up a room. She was so full of life.”

“Thank you,” Sarah replied. Gratitude welled up, making her voice unsteady. “It’s so kind of you to remember.”

“And this one here’s becoming more and more like her mother,” Mrs. Kobayashi told the woman. “Sometimes I almost forget who I’m talking to.”

The woman nodded and beamed with approval. Sarah, somewhat mollified, smiled back modestly.

Her grandmother was correct, to a certain extent. Sarah had adopted many of the social mannerisms that had endeared her mother to the public-her habit of clapping once when she had a bright idea, or her sunny demeanor and facility for easy chatter. She had internalized her mother’s attitude of taking others’ approval for granted. It hadn’t come easily. She had blurred their identities, as she had once learned to waltz by standing on her grandfather’s feet. No one was going to call her a blancmange pudding.

Yet there was a difference: these qualities were learned, whereas in her mother they had been instinctive. Sarah knew, and realized her grandmother knew, that she would never have the true spark of the original.

chapter 41

For the next two days it rained continuously: sometimes a downpour, sometimes an invisible mist. According to the weather report, a typhoon was blustering up near Hokkaido and affecting the main island.

Today the rain had stopped, but it was still overcast. Sarah and her grandmother were walking home from the open-air market. The air was damp and warm and hushed.

“Let’s cut through So-Zen Temple,” Sarah suggested.

“Good idea,” said her grandmother. “The pines will smell nice.”

The lanes near the temple had hardly changed. Prewar wooden houses still stood behind their rustic fences, the same fences Sarah had admired as a teenager. “Thank god for zoning laws,” the neighbors said. After all, So-Zen Temple was an important historical attraction.

They entered the temple grounds through an unassuming back entrance. So-Zen had multiple entrances because it was such a sprawling complex, one of the largest in the country. They walked down a path so narrow they could feel the clammy moisture of the stone walls on either side. Above them towered a profusion of trees-bamboos, flaming red maples, gnarled pines that housed the largest crows Sarah had seen anywhere. Their guttural cah-cahs broke through the cheeping of smaller birds.

“You know what Mama told me once?” Sarah gestured up at the trees with her free hand. “She said when she was little, some boy climbed all the way up one of these pine trees to get a nest of eggs. And the mother crow swooped in and pecked at his head…”

“Soh soh! And he fell and broke his leg,” supplied Mrs. Kobayashi with relish. “I do remember that.”

It was odd to think of neighborhood children having free rein in what were now official grounds. But when her mother was little, children had pattered up and down the wooden verandas of temple buildings that were now fenced and roped off and labeled like museum exhibits. On this hushed autumn morning, with the grounds empty now that the autumn tourist season had drawn to a close, Sarah sensed for the first time what So-Zen must have been like when Japan was a poor country. The temple buildings seemed to deflate, receding into the foliage and taking second place to the living creatures emboldened at having the grounds to themselves: crows flapping heavily from branch to branch; smaller birds bursting into the air in groups of two or three, their wings sounding like a deck of cards being shuffled.

“This is where Mama used to catch snakes when it rained.” Sarah gestured to a ditch running alongside the lane. It was a ditch from a bygone century: narrow and deep, lined with granite blocks. “She said she once found a white one, but she put it back because, you know, white snakes are supposed to be holy.”

“Really, she caught snakes? She never brought any home…” Mrs. Kobayashi peered down into the mossy ditch. Leaves and rainwater flowed swiftly past. “She was always a thoughtful child,” she said, “thinking ahead to spare me trouble.”

The pathway dead-ended. They could turn left toward the main part of the complex or else go right, down a long cobbled walkway shaded year-round by the overhanging branches of donguri trees. They always took the latter path because it led toward home. The walkway was strewn with small black donguri-indigenous acorns that generations of small children had picked off these cobblestones and brought home for their mothers to roast as snacks.

They passed more temples, their wood weathered to a velvety aged brown that was almost black. They were unadorned and timeless. Their simple lines sank into her soul in a way the cathedrals of Europe never could, reminding her of the eternity that lay beneath temporal emotions.

“I wonder if it’s going to rain,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. The sky seemed grayer now than it had an hour ago. A donguri dropped down onto the walkway behind them. This part of the path was always less crowded, since the temples petered out here and there was nothing to see. Today it was utterly deserted. The only other person they had seen all morning was a shaven priest clopping by in the opposite direction, dignified and austere in his dark robes with tan-colored tassels. Above high wooden geta, his tabi-clad feet gleamed white. But now he was nowhere in sight.

“Grandma, let’s sneak in and see the baby Jizo,” Sarah said impulsively. “I didn’t get a chance last time, it was summer and there were tourists all over the place…”

“Baby Jizo, where? What are you talking about?”

Sarah felt a catch of surprise, for the baby Jizo had been important to her mother. She wondered if she had just made some sort of blunder.

But it was too late now. “Mama used to come here all the time,” she explained. “I’ll show you. See, you go over this fence…” She quickly straddled the low iron tourist railing, looking back and laughing at her grandmother’s shocked expression. “Quick!” she said. “There’s nobody around. Quick!”

Mrs. Kobayashi’s face darkened with disapproval, but curiosity made her follow. Holding down her skirt with one hand, she cautiously straddled the low fence, lifting one wool-stockinged leg after the other. They slipped between the trees, squeezed through an opening in a wall of shrubbery, and there it was: a small clearing with twenty or so crumbling statues of tiny smiling bodhisattvas. They had been rescued after the war from remote country roads up in the Kyoto hills.

Mrs. Kobayashi stood in the clearing and gazed about her with a look of dawning dismay. “You realize, don’t you,” she said finally, “these aren’t ordinary Jizo. They’re markers for real-life babies that died in bad circumstances.”

Sarah knew. In past centuries, illegitimate babies had been drowned. Orphans had starved during famines. There was even an ancient tradition of putting twins to death if they were born of opposite sexes. Some of the stone markers-so old and weathered they looked like lumps of rock-had two figures etched side by side. None of these children had had a proper burial. Since there was no family to chant sutras and push the children safely into the next world, little Jizo were created in their memory. The sadder the circumstances, it was said, the sweeter the smile a stoneworker would carve. The Jizo would stand on roadsides and protect travelers from harm.

“When Mama was sad or upset as a girl, and even when she was in college,” Sarah told her grandmother, “she’d come and sit here. She made up stories about who they were and what their families were like.”

To her dismay, her grandmother gave a little shudder.

“When she brought me here,” Sarah continued, “she’d say a prayer for them, and she made me say a prayer too.” She had a flash of memory: standing here next to her mother, eyes closed and palms pressed together. For a moment she could almost smell the sun-warmed stone and hear the comforting rattle of summer leaves overhead.

“If I’d known about this when she was a girl, I would have forbidden it,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “These souls are lost and hungry, like stray dogs. If they sense a susceptible spirit, they latch on, poor things. And they drag down the living.”

It was hard to know how to respond. Mrs. Kobayashi was a practical woman with progressive views. But every so often, like now, Sarah was reminded that they came from different generations and different cultures.

“You must think I’m silly,” said her grandmother.

“No,” said Sarah. “I think it was a different time. A much scarier time.” The crumbling stones, with their aura of tragedy, did look rather sinister in the still gloom of November.

“I told her to stay away from these sorts of things.” Mrs. Kobayashi sounded hurt. “I made her promise.”

“Well,” said Sarah helplessly, “I guess it turned out all right in the end.”

“Soh. I suppose it did.”

chapter 42

Later that afternoon, someone tapped on the kitchen door. It was Mrs. Ichiyoshi, who lived four houses away.

Sarah hadn’t seen the old woman in years. She never came outdoors anymore. Once she had been a common sight, hovering over a vendor’s pushcart or sweeping the doorstep of her visitor gate. When Sarah and her cousins were small, she would give them green-tea candies from her apron pocket. They accepted politely but unenthusiastically; green tea was an old person’s flavor.

Mrs. Ichiyoshi bowed and stepped into the cement vestibule. Waving aside Mrs. Kobayashi’s invitation to come up, she perched informally on the raised ledge of the tatami floor, not bothering to take off her shoes: the classic posture of a neighborhood gossip.

“And who might this be?” She looked curiously at Sarah, who had knelt down beside her grandmother on the tatami matting. Mrs. Ichiyoshi had a deep, masculine voice.

“This,” Mrs. Kobayashi told her, “is Yoko’s girl, all grown up.”

“Aaa, Yo-chan, of course…” The old woman’s face brightened with fond recognition. Then she leaned in closer. “Have you heard?” she whispered in her gravelly voice.

Sarah wondered what news about her mother could possibly be so urgent, since she had been dead six years now.

“She’s marrying a gaijin!” Mrs. Ichiyoshi told them. “The girl’s lost her mind! A gaijin! Maa, can you imagine the to-do over at the Kobayashi house!” Her face contorted with a look of scandalous glee that Sarah had never seen. It reminded her of the time she was fourteen, when she had looked up at the Asaki balcony and seen a stranger staring at her through Mrs. Asaki’s eyes.

It was the first time she had encountered a senile person. But the greater shock was seeing her mother’s past come alive with such ugliness.

Before anyone could respond, Mrs. Ichiyoshi’s daughter-in-law came scurrying to the open door. She steered the old woman back toward home, periodically looking back over her shoulder and making jerky bows of apology. Sarah and her grandmother followed them out into the lane, bowing back in polite reassurance and staring after their retreating figures.

“Poor thing, ne,” Mrs. Kobayashi said lightly. “Gone funny in the head and still so young.” She avoided looking at Sarah. It was unbearably painful that her daughter’s disgrace had been witnessed by her child. Sarah would have felt the same way if her grandmother had known of her mother’s disadvantages in America.

Later that day Mrs. Kobayashi remarked, with a strange vehemence, “If her real father were alive, he would never have allowed her to marry an American.” With this cryptic comment, the subject was closed forever.

There were certain things Sarah never discussed with her grandmother. She never let on that her mother had been anything but a queen bee in America. And she never mentioned their fights.

In turn, she knew her grandmother kept certain things from her. When Sarah was fourteen, her aunt Tama had told her that when her mother left on her honeymoon, Mrs. Kobayashi had dropped her brave face and wept for days afterward, huddled on her knees in the parlor. “I didn’t know what to do!” Mrs. Izumi said. “I thought she was going to get sick.” At the time, Sarah had assumed this was natural behavior for two people so close. But years later, shortly before she died, her mother had said something surprising.

“It was healthier for me to go away,” she said. “We were too attached.” That surprising remark had stuck in Sarah’s memory like a shard of glass.

She wished she could ask her grandmother about it. But how could she risk hurting an old woman who had suffered so much? The very idea would have outraged her mother, with her Benkei-like protectiveness.

There was one other topic they didn’t discuss: the problem of her mother marrying an American. Until now, Sarah hadn’t grasped the full magnitude of the situation. “There was a little resistance at first,” she was told as a child, “but then you were born, and everyone’s heart just melted into a puddle.” This had seemed reasonable. In Sarah’s generation, there was nothing shocking about a mixed-race marriage.

The Ichiyoshi incident made Sarah curious about her parents’ marriage. She had grown up hearing her parents reminisce fondly about their courtship. She had been delighted by the tale of stuffy relatives-a socially prominent branch of the Sosetsu family-who had begged the Kobayashis to stop the marriage. It would impact their children’s prospects, they pleaded, referring to matchmakers who dug deeply into family histories.

“But you stood up to those silly people and made them go home, didn’t you, Mama?” young Sarah had said happily.

“Of course I did,” her mother replied. “And your grandmother backed me up, one hundred percent.”

The couple had met while Mr. Rexford was in Japan on a two-month vacation. In the fifties, Japan was still struggling to catch up with the modern world. Students were urged to practice their English on any foreigner they met. Since foreigners were scarce in inland cities, Mr. Rexford was approached by a good many college students. Faces stiff with embarrassment, they would blurt out, “Hello, I have a black pen,” or “How is the government in your country?”

One spring day he was standing in a shrine yard, in front of a wooden structure with an enormous rope hanging from the eaves. This rope was meant to be grasped with both hands and shaken, so the large bells overhead would clang and alert the spirits. Then it was customary to drop a coin into the slatted donation box, clap three times, bow, and pray.

Yoko was sitting a few yards away, a sketching board across her knees. She had recently graduated from college with a double major: one in classic Japanese literature and one in English. She was eager to display her skills to someone capable of appreciating them.

“Excuse me,” she said. “That rope at which you are gazing is made of the hair of female prisoners.”

“It was the best opening line I’d ever heard,” Mr. Rexford told his daughter years later.

Their meeting was the start of a tender friendship. After Mr. Rexford went home to America, he wrote her every week. Through their letters, they fell in love.

For many years, Yoko kept their correspondence a secret. After all, Japanese girls from good families did not consort with Americans. She explained away the letters by telling her mother that Kyoto University had a pen pal program, designed to help alumni maintain the foreign-language skills they had learned. Sarah loved the story of her grandmother innocently saying, “Here’s another letter from your pen pal!” as she collected mail from the wooden box at the visitor gate.

“I always had a gut feeling about him,” Mrs. Rexford used to tell Sarah. “I just knew. There was something in his eyes.”

Sarah had never seen beyond those charming anecdotes to the true problem: Yoko had lied to her mother for years. The sense of betrayal must have been especially great because mother and daughter were best friends. Many nights after everyone went to bed, the two had stayed up late into the night, laughing, gossiping, holding philosophical debates. How hurt her grandmother must have been when she learned the truth!

It bothered Sarah that she knew nothing about the most intense and painful time in the women’s relationship. What guilt her mother must have felt! How did she reconcile that remorse? Knowing the answer might have given Sarah a vastly different understanding of her own relationship with her mother.

chapter 43

The public bathhouse was closed for maintenance, so Sarah was preparing to bathe at the Asaki house. She padded up and down the hall, collecting clean underwear and socks and a new woolen undershirt from the tansu chest in the parlor. Her grandmother was staying home; she would wait until the bathhouse opened on the following day. “You go ahead,” she urged Sarah. Even now, old boundaries stood firm: Mrs. Kobayashi never visited the Asaki house except on formal occasions.

It was years since Sarah had bathed at the Asaki house. She had often bathed there as a child; it was quicker than public bathing and it gave the girls more time to play.

Early afternoon seemed the least intrusive time to visit. Her uncle would still be at work, and Yashiko would be in school. Momoko no longer lived at home; she had gone away to college.

“Is it too antisocial, slipping in and out like that while everyone’s away?” she asked. She suspected her mother would have chosen a more convivial hour.

“Not at all,” said her grandmother, helping to pack Sarah’s vinyl bath bag with a washbasin, shampoo, soap, and towels. “It’s the perfect time to chat with Granny Asaki.”

It was a long-standing tradition for Sarah to sit with her great-aunt and look through her photograph albums. This had originally been Mrs. Rexford and Mrs. Kobayashi’s idea. “Why don’t you run along to Granny’s,” they would urge the child, “and ask her to show you pictures from the old days?” It was partly to teach her etiquette. “It makes old women happy,” her mother explained, “to have people know how pretty they were when they were young. Remember that.”

“She was a real beauty in her day,” her grandmother would add. “I remember people always compared her to that famous actress, what’s-her-name.”

But playing up to Mrs. Asaki’s vanity was also the women’s way of ensuring that the “half” child, despite her Caucasian features, would endear herself to the matriarch of the family.

Now these visits served a different purpose: to acknowledge that the old lady was important enough, and loved enough, to receive personal visits of her own. Mrs. Rexford’s calls had been formal, peppered with deep bows and ceremonial language. But Sarah belonged to a generation awkward with such formality, so this was her way of paying respect.

“Oh, and while you’re there”-Mrs. Kobayashi looked up from Sarah’s vinyl bag and clapped her hands once, relieved at having remembered-“be sure you pick up our concert tickets.”

“Tickets? We’re going to a concert?”

“I didn’t tell you? It must have slipped my mind. What is wrong with me lately? It’s your auntie; her choir’s performing this weekend at the brand-new Civic Auditorium. You remember-the big building that’s been on the news lately.”

Sarah had never heard about her aunt singing. Oh, but wait, now she did remember something: a throwaway conversation from the summer she was fourteen.

The three of them-Mrs. Kobayashi, Mrs. Rexford, and Sarah-had been sitting on the garden veranda one muggy afternoon, fanning themselves with paper uchiwa as cicadas droned in the maple branches overhead. Hearing the rapid crunch of gravel, they turned their heads to see Mrs. Nishimura hurrying past along the alley, her slender form flashing in and out of view through the slats in the wooden fence.

“A! Late for the bus again,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “It’s her choir day.”

“Choir? Really!” Mrs. Rexford’s voice held the kindly geniality that accomplished people use when praising those with less skill. “Maa, good for her!”

“It’s with some other PTA mothers,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “They’ve formed some kind of a group.” She leaned over and twisted off a dead leaf from a nearby fuchsia bush, placing it in the center of her lap to throw away later. “By the way, I’m thinking of frying up some gyoza for dinner. Or do you think it’s too hot?”

Sarah asked if her aunt was a good singer.

Her grandmother had considered this for a moment, gazing off into the distance. “I believe so,” she finally said, “but nothing outstanding, I think. It was always your mother they picked for the solos in school.”

Sarah now reached over and slipped her clean underclothes into the bag on her grandmother’s lap. “The Civic Auditorium, really? They let PTA choirs perform there?”

“PTA?” Now it was Mrs. Kobayashi’s turn to look blank. “What are you talking about…aaa, I see. No no, she stopped that choir years ago, when your cousins finished elementary school.” She seemed amused by Sarah’s confused expression. “You!” she chided. “Anta, it’s no wonder we’re at cross purposes all the time. Your information’s always outdated.”

Sarah suppressed a flash of resentment. But her grandmother was right; she lived too far away to be in the family loop.

“Your auntie’s in a real choir now.” Mrs. Kobayashi handed the bath bag over to Sarah and rose up from her floor cushion. “You’ll see.”

“I’m trying to remember,” said Sarah, “if I’ve ever heard her sing around the house…”

But her grandmother had gone away to another room.

She reappeared several minutes later, carrying a loaded tea tray. “I checked the clock, it’s still early,” she said. “There’s time for tea before you go.”

They settled into the kotatsu and chatted idly over a pot of tea and sugared black beans.

Their talk turned to the Izumis, who still lived far away to the south, where they held prominent positions in the religious community. They participated in various national conferences. Little Jun, now a teenager, was skipping college in order to devote his life to the church. The Izumis had a full life, for they had made many friends in the church.

Reflecting on all this, the two women shook their heads in silent wonder.

“We always thought it would blow over,” said Mrs. Kobayashi.

“I know.” But it made sense. For now her aunt had the loving family she had always wanted, with herself at its vital center.

Sarah had seen her aunt briefly during her last visit. That was the year of Mr. Kobayashi’s death, and Mrs. Izumi had come to pay respects. She brought with her one of those fragrant gift melons that were sold in their own box. Since she couldn’t pray at the funerary table, she sat at the dining room table and sipped cold wheat tea.

That was a busy afternoon. A stream of visitors had padded through the dining area on stockinged feet, bowing politely to Mrs. Izumi as they made their way to the parlor. Sarah kept her aunt company at the dining table. They said little. They listened to the miniature gong in the next room, to the hushed babble of voices as visitors exchanged greetings with the lady of the house. Sarah had wondered if her aunt felt any longing to join that group, to stand for one last time before the altar from which she had exiled herself.

During a lull, Sarah had placed her aunt’s melon on a dish and taken it into the parlor. But the table was already full, cluttered with orchids and fruits and pastries. She put the melon on the floor, on the other side of the table, where people’s feet wouldn’t strike it.

“Mama and Grandpa used to love those melons,” she told her aunt, going back into the dining room. “Auntie, you’re the only one who remembered.”

Her aunt had smiled at her, and the sweetness of that smile flooded Sarah’s heart with a great tenderness. It was her old childhood crush, refined over the years to something bittersweet. Mrs. Izumi had grown a bit stouter, but she was still pretty. She had achieved the settled, contented air of a matron, with nothing left of the old coquettish vivacity.

Sarah now asked, “Does Auntie Tama still wear her hair swept back in a French twist? The same way Mama did?”

“As far as I know. She still copies a lot of things from your mother. She looked up to her so much, you know. I think it went deep.” Mrs. Kobayashi shifted position under the kotatsu blanket. “This blanket’s so hot!” she said. “I’m turning down the heat switch.” In the same breath she added, “She wants me to come live with them.”

“Really!” Sarah thought her aunt had given up by now. But one never knew about people.

“I told her I’d think about it, but…”

The original plan had been for Mrs. Kobayashi to come live with the Rexfords when the time came. She and Mrs. Rexford had often talked of the things they would do together: the dishes they would cook, the garden they would tend. Having looked forward to this for so long, it must have been hard for Mrs. Kobayashi to imagine living with anyone else. It was reminiscent, in a way, of marrying for the second time when it was the other sibling she really wanted.

“Ne, Grandma, it’s not as if you need looking after. I mean, you’re still walking around wearing heels.”

“Exactly! I plan to stay independent as long as possible,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “I overhear those women at the bathhouse, the ones who live with their children. And I can guess what’s going on with Granny Asaki, even though she puts on a public face…It’s a secure life, to be sure. But secure doesn’t mean easy. Human nature being what it is, it’s best to think twice before putting yourself at someone else’s mercy.”

Sarah liked this about her grandmother: the worldliness that surfaced at unexpected times.

“I suppose moving out there is the smart thing to do,” continued Mrs. Kobayashi. “It’s not as if there’s any other…” She gave a little sigh.

“But you want to stay near Auntie Masako, don’t you.”

“Yes. I think…I think she’d like me to stay. I mean, she’s never asked me outright. But I want to be near her anyway.”

“But Granny might not die for a long time. She’s really healthy. She’ll probably live to be a hundred.”

“Yes, I know.”

Sarah imagined the women’s future: chance meetings in the open-air market, brief stolen moments over a bit of grilled eel or liver. She had been here long enough to see that for all their new closeness, there was little change in their day-to-day routine.

“It doesn’t seem like enough,” Sarah said. “You hardly even see each other, or talk, or anything. It just doesn’t seem fair.”

“It’s not fair,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “But it’s enough.”

“Oh, Grandma.” Sarah felt a great sadness. “Why can’t you spend more time together? Those old boundaries can’t possibly matter now. You’re her mother.”

“I gave Granny-san my word. After she’s gone-”

“But what if you die first?” Sarah’s voice rose in spite of herself. “Granny’s had all those good years. You and Auntie didn’t have any. It’s not right.”

Mrs. Kobayashi shook her head stubbornly. “I don’t agree,” she said. “And I know your auntie feels the same way I do.” Sarah, sensing that gap of generation and culture between them, knew it was a lost cause.

“It’s like a love affair,” she marveled. “A sad, beautiful love affair.”

Her grandmother nodded. “Romance isn’t just between men and women,” she said. “It’s a state of mind, I suppose. It may be beautiful but it comes with pain. And sacrifice. Not just for yourself, but for others around you. I’ve often thought that being in love is bad for a family. It’s much less risky when people merely love. There’s a big difference, you know.”

Sarah sipped her tea, pondering this.

“I’ve been in love all my life,” said Mrs. Kobayashi.

“Your whole life?”

“My whole life. It’s the one part of me I always protected.”

Growing up, Sarah had thought of her grandmother’s charisma only as it related to her mother. With her mother gone, she could see her grandmother had a force of her own. It wasn’t the social magnetism of her mother. Nor was it the fetching femininity of her aunt Tama. Her grandmother’s charisma went deeper, somehow, than those surface attractions. She made people feel something of the magic and purity and passion that were still possible in this world.

“I admire you,” Sarah said impulsively. “I do. Not many people are brave enough to give up security for love.” Her vehemence made them both laugh. She felt her sadness lift, replaced by a girlish kind of optimism.

“Your mother, she had that quality too,” said Mrs. Kobayashi. “That’s why we got along.”

Sarah, remembering, nodded. From somewhere outside in the rainy afternoon, there came the muted pee-poh pee-poh of a passing ambulance.

“And you got a chance to experience it. But your auntie, she never had much opportunity for romance.”

“Not until now,” Sarah said.

“That’s right,” said her grandmother. “Not until now.”

chapter 44

After her tea, Sarah slipped her sock-clad feet into an old pair of geta and clopped over to the Asaki house. A drizzle made pinpricks of sound on her umbrella and on the surrounding garden foliage. She lingered in the lane, breathing in the smell of rain and leaves and wet wood.

Alerted by the sound of the garden gate rolling open, Mrs. Nishimura came to meet Sarah at the door. “Go right on up, Sarah-chan,” she said. “Granny’s waiting for you. I’ll bring up refreshments a little later.”

Sarah climbed the old-fashioned stairs, which were exceedingly steep and made her feel as if she were climbing a stepladder. She planted her hands firmly on the step above her-partly because there were no handrails, only wooden walls, and partly because her socks had no traction against the aged, slippery wood. Dangerous, she thought. But no one in this family, young or old, had ever had an accident.

Emerging from the dark stairway onto the landing, Sarah slid open the fusuma panel and found her great-aunt hunched over a kotatsu near the glass panels. All around her, strewn on the tatami floor, were drifts of persimmon leaves. Each year she collected them from the tree in the back garden, while they were still pliable enough to wipe clean with a moist cloth. This she did painstakingly over a period of weeks-she had little else to do-and when they dried out completely, she crumbled them in tins to use as medicinal tea throughout the year. “It’s excellent for a woman’s health,” she always said, though the tea was so bitter no one else would drink it.

“Sarah-chan!” Mrs. Asaki put down the leaf she was wiping. “Come in, come in!”

Reverently, Sarah stepped over the threshold. Nothing had changed since her childhood: the thick fusuma panels inlaid with green seaweed; the view from the balcony, now shrouded in mist; caged finches hanging in a corner. The shoji panels had been pushed aside and the spacious room pulsed with a white, watery light.

“Come, come,” cried the old woman gaily in her singsong accent. “Don’t mind the leaves, just step around. Come, sit down.” In old age she was hunchbacked, with a body as frail and insubstantial as a child’s. But her spirit was as game as ever. She still dyed her hair the old-fashioned way, using some kind of dried plant sold by Chinese herbalists.

Mrs. Asaki now lifted the edge of the kotatsu quilt for Sarah to slip under, as if holding open a door. Sarah acknowledged this with a smile and a half-bow of thanks, feeling a sudden rush of love for this old woman who had filled her earliest memories with nursery chants and games. “Granny,” she said. “I’m so happy to see you healthy and thriving each time I visit.”

“Tell her hello too,” Mrs. Asaki replied. “Tell her that when all this rain passes, I’d love to pay my respects to the altar.”

There had been several such moments lately, for Mrs. Asaki was losing her hearing. But she was a proud woman, too proud to say “What?” She faked her way with aplomb, and only occasional slips betrayed the effort with which she hid her infirmity. Sarah never let on that she knew. She merely spoke as little as possible, relying on smiles, nods, and comments that were easy to lip-read.

She reached for one of the albums lying on the kotatsu in preparation for her visit. Mrs. Asaki picked up her persimmon leaf and commenced wiping. They sat in companionable silence while the finches ruffled their feathers and pecked contentedly at their feed. Every so often Sarah slid the book toward her great-aunt and remarked, “So pretty!” or “Auntie was so cute!” Her great-aunt gave a pleased cackle and replied: “That was a high school field trip.” Or, “That was two years after I got married.”

Here was a photograph of Mrs. Asaki as a young woman: tall, unrecognizably beautiful, standing under a tree. She wore a white fur draped around her neck and down the side of her silk kimono. She had grown up in the rural outskirts of Kyoto, the daughter of a town mayor. Despite this unremarkable pedigree, she had married into a fine old family in the city on the strength of her looks. In this picture she was tilting her head demurely to the side, but her sloe-eyed gaze held that gleam that beautiful women have when they know they’re invincible.

Sarah knew that Granny had been asked to stay upstairs to make things easier on everyone. It was too bad; social activity had been her lifeblood. Mrs. Kobayashi sympathized too. “Poor thing,” she had said. “It would be so much healthier if she could chatter away in a public bathhouse, instead of being cooped up there all alone.” But theirs was more of a philosophical pity, for they also understood Mrs. Nishimura’s position. As Sarah’s mother used to say: What can you do? There was no perfect solution, and right now it was Mrs. Nishimura’s turn to bloom at the expense of someone else.

The old woman never let on that her circumstances weren’t ideal. “Who wants to run about at my age?” she bragged. “I’m perfectly happy in my little kingdom upstairs. Surrounded by family, waited on hand and foot, maa maa, I’m incredibly lucky…”

Sarah scrutinized the photograph again. Mrs. Asaki, glancing over to see what was taking so much time, gave a little laugh of recognition. “I was young then,” she said.

In college, Sarah had learned that history was the study of power rising and power falling. Sitting here, leafing through the pages of another woman’s life, she felt the truth of this and was humbled. It occurred to her that her own past-the trio of her mother and grandmother and herself that had once seemed so extraordinary, strong and shining like the sun-was hardly unique. Countless other suns, like her great-aunt’s, had risen and fallen as a matter of course, each with its own forgotten story, its own poignance.

chapter 45

Sarah found her aunt alone in the kitchen, making preparations for dinner. “I’m just finishing up this side dish,” she told Sarah, in apology for cooking in the presence of a guest. She was sautéing a combination of julienned carrots, hijiki seaweed, and fried tofu skin. It looked identical to the dish Mrs. Kobayashi often made, but this would have much less soy sauce and sugar. Mrs. Kobayashi disparagingly referred to it as “Kyoto flavor.”

Before going off to undress, Sarah leaned against the kitchen doorjamb and watched her aunt. The radio was on, a plastic Hello Kitty model long outgrown by Momoko and Yashiko. For years now, it had been tuned to the same classical station that played everything from the Western melodies of Strauss and Puccini to the elegant notes of koto, punctuated by a shamisen’s bitter twangs.

In general, Mrs. Nishimura seemed unchanged. Under her apron she wore a blouse of pastel yellow, with a round collar that had embroidered daisies on it. She still wore the short bob, although Sarah could see it was professionally cut at a salon, with graduated layers and the subtlest of brownish highlights to indicate she was coloring her roots.

But on closer inspection, Sarah did sense something of the change her grandmother had mentioned. That virginal, ethereal quality was gone. As Mrs. Nishimura reached for a bottle of seasoning, she leaned across the counter with an unfamiliar physical brio that reminded Sarah, for an unsettling moment, of her own mother.

She stared, but Mrs. Nishimura made no more surprising moves. Stirring quietly at the stove, she was once again the aunt of Sarah’s childhood: a gentle figure who never frowned or grimaced, who hovered with a damp cloth for wiping children’s fingers.

An early memory floated up in her mind. She was six years old; they were walking to the park on a winter afternoon. She was in the middle, between her aunt and Momoko-Yashiko wasn’t born yet. “Hold on to Big Sister’s hand, for safety,” Mrs. Nishimura had told Momoko. As young as she was, Sarah knew her aunt was doing this to flatter her; any other adult would have walked in the middle, keeping one child on either side. Little Momoko obediently clutched Sarah’s hand with her mittened one, looking up at her with a chubby, trusting face framed by a knitted hood with animal ears. Sarah felt a rush of importance, followed by overwhelming love for her aunt. The three of them held hands and strolled down the sidewalk. “Ten ten ten-ten koro rin…,” Mrs. Nishimura chanted softly as they swung their joined hands back and forth.

It had struck Sarah, with a small child’s intuitiveness, that no one but her aunt could have been capable of such sensitivity. Looking back now, she wondered if even then she had sensed a kinship between them, for they both knew how it felt to be on the outside.

“Sarah-chan,” her aunt said, “are you finding this Japanese weather too chilly?”

“Not at all, Auntie. Today’s quite warm, I thought.”

“Yes, you’re right!” said Mrs. Nishimura. “It’s unseasonably warm.”

Talking to her aunt was slightly awkward, as always. On a purely technical level, she wasn’t used to making allowances for Sarah’s simple Japanese vocabulary. Mrs. Kobayashi had the knack for putting complex ideas into simple terms. Nuclear physics, for instance, became “the rules of science involving-” followed by an exploding sound, with both hands outlining an enormous H-bomb mushroom. “Right, right!” Sarah would say, laughing and nodding. But her aunt would use the term nuclear physics, then be at a loss if Sarah didn’t understand. So she usually stuck to the simplest of conversational topics.

But language aside, direct emotional entry was difficult. Mrs. Nishimura had a particularly traditional sensibility, with an oblique quality Sarah recognized from historical films. She had to remind herself that her mother, who had married a foreigner, was the unusual one. Mrs. Rexford had little patience for old-school Japanese opacity. “I have a cosmopolitan soul,” she used to say, only half joking.

“Auntie,” Sarah said, “I’m really looking forward to attending your concert.”

Mrs. Nishimura glanced up from the stove and laughed, waving her free hand before her face in a no-no motion as if the very idea of her performing in a concert was absurd.

“I feel bad that I never even knew about your choir.”

“You mustn’t feel bad,” her aunt said mildly.

After some more small talk, Sarah went off to undress behind the cotton curtain. It seemed odd that the informal dining room should adjoin the bathing room, but this was common in traditional Japanese homes where private baths had to be added on. It made more sense, she thought, than the Western custom of placing the bath in the same room as the toilet.

Fully naked, she slid open the glass door and entered the steaming bathing area. The tub was deeper than it was wide, with a lid to keep in the steam. Directly above the bath, mounted on the tiled wall, was a digital water temperature monitor (she was amused by this modern gadget, which was out of place with the rest of the house). At the other end of the room was a waist-high shower nozzle. Retrieving a low plastic stool from a stacked pile, Sarah drew it up before the nozzle, sat down, and soaped herself. As she shampooed her hair, she could hear faint clattering sounds in the kitchen, the energetic chatter of a commercial on the radio. Then the commercial ended and music came on. She recognized Pavarotti’s soulful tenor launching into his classic rendition of “Ave Maria.”

“Ave Maria”! There was a family story…

“She learned this new song in middle school,” Mrs. Asaki had once told the children. “And every day, when she went upstairs to hang up the towels and handkerchiefs, I’d hear…” The children waited eagerly as she placed her teacup deliberately onto the saucer with an elderly hand that, even back then, trembled. “Ave Maria!” She said it ominously: Ah-beh-mah-lih-ah! “All those strange foreign words-” Mrs. Asaki threw back her head and trilled an affected operatic tune. “Aaah…lalalaah…So loud! All over the neighborhood! I finally had to make her stop. Maa, what the neighbors must have thought!”

Sarah and her cousins had sprawled on the tatami floor, shrieking with laughter at Granny’s operatic performance. It was a bizarre anecdote. Neighbors here did not shout out to each other, or argue in public, or burst into song on balconies. Such activities were more in line with florid, excitable countries like Italy.

“Mommy did that, really?” Momoko gasped, and the image of gentle Mrs. Nishimura singing at the top of her voice made the girls burst anew into giggles. “She must have been really happy, to sing like that!” little Yashiko said.

Sarah turned off the shower and sat still, listening. This time, as an adult, she understood what she was hearing: a prayer, a pouring forth of something intense and mournful.

Now Pavarotti’s voice swelled in volume, reawakening her childhood remorse for her aunt. A random remark flashed through her mind: her mother (or grandmother) saying, “Let’s not mention this to Ma-chan. It’s just easier.” She was ashamed-partly on behalf of her mother and grandmother, but also for the eager way she had complied, proud of her place in their golden, laughter-filled circle.

Her remorse wasn’t just for her aunt. It was also for herself, for the change that had started when she hid the cream puffs behind her back. From that day on, she had followed the trajectory of that choice. Not that she regretted it. She had grabbed at life, as was her right; she had grabbed at a place in the sun. But she had always felt a vague regret for that side of herself she had left behind, that side akin to her aunt. Her memory of the winter day, when she and her aunt had held hands against the world, glowed with an innocent purity that seemed lost to her forever.

But with her mother gone, maybe things could be made right.

That day, for the first time, Sarah let go of a penance she had carried so long she had almost forgotten its weight. With a feeling of relief that was almost luxury, she felt herself relax into second place.

chapter 46

The radio was playing “Tea for Two” when Sarah emerged from behind the curtain. The informal eating area was fragrant with soy sauce and ginger, and a small plate of seasonal chestnut dumplings was waiting for her on the low table. In the kitchen, her aunt hummed along to the lively cha cha chas.

Taking off her apron, Mrs. Nishimura sat down at the low table to keep Sarah company as she ate the dumplings.

“Are these the tickets?” Sarah picked up the flowered envelope placed neatly beside her plate.

“Soh,” said Mrs. Nishimura.

Sarah peeked inside. The tickets, glossy and professional-looking, showed an unexpectedly high admission price. The title was printed in raised Chinese characters: “Songs That Got Us Through: A Wartime Retrospective.”

Mrs. Nishimura was eying Sarah’s untouched cup of tea. “Oh-do you not drink Japanese tea?” she asked.

“Of course I do!” Sarah felt a twinge of her old insecurity. “Auntie, don’t you remember?” She took a sip of the tea and, after a suitably appreciative silence, asked, “Are you a soprano?”

“No-I sing with a low voice,” her aunt replied. Mrs. Kobayashi would have given Sarah credit for an easy word like alto, considering it was a Western term to start with.

The large house was silent. The rice cooker bubbled in the kitchen.

“But your mother,” continued Mrs. Nishimura, “she used to sing with a high voice. A beautiful high voice. I can still remember her singing ‘Days of Yore’ at our middle school graduation.”

“Really? Tell me…” Now they were on secure ground. Sarah relaxed and listened with quiet pride. Even in death, her mother could fill up a conversational vacuum.

At one point she looked up and saw pity in the older woman’s eyes. It resonated sharply, even unpleasantly, for this was how she had always regarded her aunt. Now she realized, with dawning embarrassment, that her aunt was dwelling on her mother’s singing for no other reason but kindness.

“Auntie?”

“Yes?”

“I’m glad you’re here for Grandma.” Sarah plunged awkwardly into the heart of the matter. “When she talks about you, her face lights up. She’s so happy. I’m glad, and I know Mama would be glad too.” Truthfully, she wasn’t completely glad. Not yet. It struck her that siblings everywhere must face such ambivalence, and she was thankful she had been spared this as a child.

“No one will ever be like your mother,” said Mrs. Nishimura. “But I’ll do my best to take care of your grandma while you’re away.” She refilled their teacups with a no-nonsense briskness that reminded Sarah, once again, of her own mother.

Later, sated with tea and dumplings, Sarah got up to leave. She had probably held up her aunt’s dinner preparations. Gathering up her bath bag, she maneuvered carefully around the low table so as not to poke a hole in the shoji panels behind her.

Her aunt walked her out.

“You must really love singing,” Sarah said as she followed her aunt down the hallway, past one fusuma panel after another.

“Aaa, I know,” said Mrs. Nishimura sorrowfully, as if admitting to a bad habit.

Sarah had a deep sense of futility. We’re family, she wanted to say. Don’t use such good manners.

They came out to the front gate. Darkness had fallen, though it was still early. The drizzle had stopped, and the air was sharp with the smell of wet pine. It was indeed warm for November; the typhoon in Hokkaido had altered the air pressure.

Sarah rolled open the slatted gate and paused on the stone step. A faint breeze wafted against her skin, still overheated from the bath.

Caught in the knobby branches of the Ichiyoshis’ pine tree, heavy with white light and almost touchable, was a full moon. “Oh, look!” Sarah said. “The moon.”

“Aaa, isn’t it pretty.”

They were silent awhile, looking up.

“I look at the moon a lot,” Mrs. Nishimura said, and a certain quality in her voice made Sarah take notice. “Like this, with the branches silhouetted on it. In traditional art, you know, the moon’s never bare. It’s always half-hidden behind branches or clouds.” Sarah knew the art to which she was referring. She, too, had been affected by those old Japanese tableaus, by the sorrowful beauty of a shining thing glimpsed, only partially, through a layer of impediments.

Halfway down the lane, she looked back. Her aunt was standing by the gate as she had since Sarah’s childhood, waiting to return her wave.

chapter 47

Mrs. Nishimura’s concert took place on a still, overcast Sunday afternoon. Sarah and her grandmother took a taxi to the matinee. Mr. Nishimura was working and Yashiko, having already attended the opening concert, had somewhere else to be. Mrs. Asaki was too old for these kinds of outings.

They sat quietly while the seats filled up around them. The orchestra made discordant notes as it warmed up. The audience was mostly middle-aged and older since the concert was a retrospective, held in honor of a songwriter who had written many of the classic tunes of the postwar period. War nostalgia was popular now. There was always something on television about a restaurant serving some wartime dish or a middle-aged person being tearfully reunited with a childhood friend from the occupation era. Sarah, who remembered how fondly her mother used to say “our generation, growing up after the war,” understood this need to look back.

She wondered what her mother would have thought of this state-of-the-art auditorium. She could picture her alert eyes looking about, taking in the high acoustical ceilings, the discreet spotlights built into the walls. “They didn’t spare any expense, did they,” she would have said, “but I still liked the small, dark building from my childhood.”

Not so long ago Sarah would have shared this thought with her grandmother, tossing out her mother’s name as if she were still one of them. But it felt unnatural now, even forced. She was beginning to like having her mother to herself, like a private talisman. Her grandmother had her talisman too, and the two versions would become less and less alike as the years wore on.

She flipped idly through the program. Her knowledge of Chinese characters was spotty, so she recognized only the title-“Songs That Got Us Through”-as well as the words Paris, Berlin, and New York. Mrs. Kobayashi had mentioned that the choir performed abroad on occasion, though not everyone went. Many of them were homemakers with children, and their domestic duties came first.

Sarah put down her program and glanced over at her grandmother, who looked demure and poised in her mink collar. “They didn’t spare any expense, did they?” she said.

“Soh, they certainly didn’t.”

The spotlights caught the instruments down in the orchestra pit, bringing out the expensive gleam of polished wood and brass. This is a real choir, thought Sarah, a choir to be taken seriously. Her aunt must have worked hard-and kept it to herself, so as not to give her family the impression of neglect. Not that it stopped Mrs. Asaki from saying things like, “It’s a nice life she has. Singing like a bird while her old mother eats leftovers. But maaa, she loves it, so what can you do?”

Now the instruments died down and the lights dimmed overhead. Sarah leaned forward in anticipation of her aunt’s entrance. And in that moment, she knew with certainty that she was going to be all right on her own. Her mother had even said it: Once you’ve come first, it stays a part of you. This moment, right now, was the strongest she had ever felt: being secure enough in her own powers to enjoy someone else about to have her day in the sun.

The choir began filing onstage, one by one, unassuming and matronly in their navy-blue dresses. They lacked the seasoned stage presence of professional performers; one sensed these were ordinary women who, like the rest of the audience, had been personally affected by the songs they were about to sing. From the rising power of the clapping, Sarah knew the audience sensed this, too, and was responding to it. The choir flowed smoothly into its assigned lines, like a marching band. “Front row,” Mrs. Kobayashi whispered, leaning over to point her out. “Over there, third from the left.” And there indeed was Mrs. Nishimura, looking small but composed.

The conductor strode in swiftly to the center of the stage, bowed deeply, then turned his back to the audience. He raised his baton and waited. The clapping died down. Someone coughed. Sarah turned her head to look up at the audience: row upon row of pale faces rose up in the darkness, waiting. On this threshold, she felt a deep, sharp joy for her aunt and also a fore-shadowing of what lay ahead for the three of them: not the shining, laughing summers of her mother’s time but a tender new season that would resonate, like those bittersweet Japanese tableaus, with all the complexities of time’s passage.

The first soprano was a lone voice, barely audible. Then the others-second soprano, then first alto (that was Mrs. Nishimura’s section)-joined in with steadily gathering force, and finally the second alto, its heft overtaking all the others. Their voices swelled to a crescendo, then paused, the notes spreading out like ink in water.

They sang of yellow rapeseed flowers, blooming by the roadside in spring. Sarah’s mother had sung this song to her when she was little. Sarah hadn’t learned until much later that it was about a bomb site in Nagasaki. Today, transformed by the orchestra and the sheer power of voices, its familiar childish words were elevated as she had never heard them: rich, omniscient. Small flowers are nodding, they sang out with one voice. Cheery and bright…

Sarah thought of young Aunt Masako standing alone amidst flapping laundry, singing out to an empty sky. She thought of the strange power of thwarted emotions. She thought how pervasive thwarted love was, how it lay beneath so much of life’s beauty. We let them ferment, her mother had said, till you can’t tell them apart.

chapter 48

On a hushed, sunny afternoon when the last of the red maple leaves were drifting down from the trees, Mrs. Asaki came tapping at the kitchen door. As always, she had an official excuse for coming: to pay her respects at her ancestors’ family altar. According to Mrs. Kobayashi, the old lady paid her respects quite regularly. “She looks forward to coming here,” Mrs. Kobayashi had confided to Sarah. “Poor thing.”

While her grandmother made preparations in the kitchen, Sarah readied the kotatsu in the family room. She brought over an extra floor cushion from the stack in the corner-it was autumn, so the cotton covers were a warm shade of rust-and turned on the heat switch under the table. She glanced at Granny Asaki, who stood hunched before the altar, murmuring under her breath and massaging her tasseled prayer beads with practiced, efficient hand movements that spoke of a lifetime of prayer.

“A little offering for your mama,” she said afterward, nodding at the envelope on the altar.

“Thank you, Granny! Thank you so much.” She lifted the kotatsu blanket. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” she asked as her great-aunt lowered her frail limbs onto the floor cushion. “So sunny and warm.”

“Oh no, it’s not too warm,” the old woman said brightly, reaching under the table to feel the heater. “The temperature’s just right.”

Sarah smiled and settled the quilt around her great-aunt’s bony hips. Mrs. Asaki watched her, nodding imperceptibly.

“You’re a good girl, ne,” she said. “Your mama in heaven is happy with the way you turned out.”

Mrs. Kobayashi entered the room with a tray of covered ceramic bowls. “You’ve picked a good day to come!” she told her sister-in-law. Placing the heavy tray on the table, she walked over to the frosted glass panels and slid them all the way open; they rattled in their wooden frames. Sunshine poured in, catching glints of gold in the straw of the tatami mats. With sunlight came the smell of burning leaves and the vague sadness of a season nearing its end.

Mrs. Kobayashi stood there for a moment, gazing out at the laundry courtyard. Above the fence the sky was deep blue, with that high dome of autumn described in classic Japanese poetry. “How long has it been,” she said, “since we had such beautiful weather?”

This, Mrs. Asaki heard perfectly. “Soh, it’s been forever!” she replied. “Ahh, how good the sun feels! Like warm hands on my body.”

This mystery of selective hearing had been explained to Sarah by her grandmother. “It’s only certain pitches she can’t hear,” Mrs. Kobayashi had said. “You and your cousins, you all have high-pitched voices because you’re young women, so she can’t hear what you’re saying. But my voice has low tones, so we never have a problem. Now, your auntie has high tones, which makes things difficult. You wouldn’t think it, would you, with her being an alto and all. But there you are.”

Settled into the kotatsu with her elders, Sarah did nothing more than smile and nod. She wanted Granny to have this hour free from auditory strain, so she could relax and have a lively chat without shame and disability hanging over her. She remembered how carefully and correctly her own mother had once spoken English.

“Would you care for some ten-don, Granny-san?” Mrs. Kobayashi lifted the lid from one of the ceramic bowls. Steam rose into the air, along with a mouthwatering aroma. Ten-don was a humble dish of day-old tempura, reheated in a flavorful broth and poured over rice and eggs. It was hardly the thing to serve a guest, but as Mrs. Kobayashi had once explained to Sarah, old people secretly craved comfort food over tea and fancy confectionery. Besides, this dish was easier on the teeth. Broth turned the crispy crust into a soft, flavorful mush that melted in the mouth, and the vegetables-sweet potatoes, carrots, eggplant-turned as soft as pudding.

Mrs. Asaki’s aged eyes gleamed, and she hunched over her bowl with a little sigh of pleasure. With hands that slightly trembled, she lifted a chopstickful to her mouth. “Granny-san, it’s delicious!” she said. She had always freely acknowledged that Mrs. Kobayashi was the better cook of the two. “It’s been years since I tasted this dish.”

Mrs. Asaki’s reprieve was not just auditory; she rarely received such warmth and attention at home.

“That’s why she fritters everything away on money envelopes,” Mrs. Kobayashi had once told Sarah. “You watch, there won’t be anything left for them to inherit. She always thinks of herself first.”

“She thinks smart,” Sarah had said. For in a traditional world where women had little power, Mrs. Asaki had used her wits. She had married well, strategically leveraging her physical beauty. And in adopting a child in her forties, she was surely motivated by more than the simple desire to love a child. There must have been an awareness that, in a society without nursing homes, a childless woman was doomed. A son would have been preferable to a daughter, but once again Mrs. Asaki had shown foresight by moving her son-in-law into her own home, ensuring her place within their family unit. And through shrewd use of her monthly pension, she still maintained a degree of control. All in all, she had played her cards well. She had achieved the security she sought, if not the full loving spirit that might have accompanied it. Sarah thought her great-aunt would have been an interesting woman to talk to, if she had known her as a fellow adult instead of a one-dimensional granny.

“Has Sarah-chan been telling you lots of stories about America?” Mrs. Asaki asked.

“Yes indeed. The child’s a hard worker,” said Mrs. Kobayashi proudly. “She tells me she works long hours. Large companies are very demanding, you know.”

What Sarah had not mentioned was how disillusioned she was by her career, how little it had lived up to her expectations. She remembered her view of life as a child: a maze in which a perfectly good path sometimes veered off in an unexpected direction. She wondered now if that was the norm rather than the exception.

“Maa, you have a good appetite,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “That’s very healthy. Old people like us, we have to keep up our appetites or else we’re done for.”

Mrs. Asaki, who had been greedily focused on her bowl, came to with a little start of embarrassment. If her wrinkled skin could have blushed, it would have.

“It’s good to eat,” Mrs. Kobayashi reassured her. “Don’t worry about appearances, Granny-san. We’re past that, you and I.” She covered the old woman’s gnarled hand with her own. “We’re the only ones left. We have to keep on living, with all our might. Ne?”

Mrs. Asaki nodded her head, like a child.

“Let’s enjoy our food to the fullest, Granny-san,” Mrs. Kobayashi said. “Let’s not leave a single bite.”

Sarah watched them. Both women, in their different ways, had forged through life as best they could. Mrs. Asaki had used foresight and strategy. Mrs. Kobayashi had followed a linked chain of great loves. In the process, they had caused damage-to each other, to innocent bystanders. And although they would never be true friends, each understood what the other had gone through. Each understood the nature of the journey. Life was difficult. Safe havens were few and impermanent.

Something of that hardship and peril transmitted itself to Sarah. Life will be hard, she thought, harder than I know. She wondered how she herself would make her way through life.

Was she equal to it? She thought so. For she could feel the women’s reserves passing down to her, reserves she would draw on in years to come. She felt a dim premonition of her power, similar to what she had felt the summer she was fourteen. Her mind flashed back-instinctively, as if fingering a talisman-to the summer day when her mother had held her hand in hers.

“You’re right, Granny-san,” Mrs. Asaki said in the singsong accent of old Kyoto. “We have to keep on living, with all our might.” Nodding her aged head, she looked over at Sarah. “Ne?” she said.

And Sarah affirmed it with vigorous nods of her own.