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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll eat it,” piped up Yashiko.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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