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 Many of the rickety doors had been replaced by sturdier models with slats of brown plastic instead of traditional wood.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.

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.”