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.

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.”