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.

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.