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.

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.