“Sarah-chan!” Mrs. Asaki put down the leaf she was wiping. “Come in, come in!”

Reverently, Sarah stepped over the threshold. Nothing had changed since her childhood: the thick fusuma panels inlaid with green seaweed; the view from the balcony, now shrouded in mist; caged finches hanging in a corner. The shoji panels had been pushed aside and the spacious room pulsed with a white, watery light.

“Come, come,” cried the old woman gaily in her singsong accent. “Don’t mind the leaves, just step around. Come, sit down.” In old age she was hunchbacked, with a body as frail and insubstantial as a child’s. But her spirit was as game as ever. She still dyed her hair the old-fashioned way, using some kind of dried plant sold by Chinese herbalists.

Mrs. Asaki now lifted the edge of the kotatsu quilt for Sarah to slip under, as if holding open a door. Sarah acknowledged this with a smile and a half-bow of thanks, feeling a sudden rush of love for this old woman who had filled her earliest memories with nursery chants and games. “Granny,” she said. “I’m so happy to see you healthy and thriving each time I visit.”

“Tell her hello too,” Mrs. Asaki replied. “Tell her that when all this rain passes, I’d love to pay my respects to the altar.”

There had been several such moments lately, for Mrs. Asaki was losing her hearing. But she was a proud woman, too proud to say “What?” She faked her way with aplomb, and only occasional slips betrayed the effort with which she hid her infirmity. Sarah never let on that she knew. She merely spoke as little as possible, relying on smiles, nods, and comments that were easy to lip-read.

She reached for one of the albums lying on the kotatsu in preparation for her visit. Mrs. Asaki picked up her persimmon leaf and commenced wiping. They sat in companionable silence while the finches ruffled their feathers and pecked contentedly at their feed. Every so often Sarah slid the book toward her great-aunt and remarked, “So pretty!” or “Auntie was so cute!” Her great-aunt gave a pleased cackle and replied: “That was a high school field trip.” Or, “That was two years after I got married.”

Here was a photograph of Mrs. Asaki as a young woman: tall, unrecognizably beautiful, standing under a tree. She wore a white fur draped around her neck and down the side of her silk kimono. She had grown up in the rural outskirts of Kyoto, the daughter of a town mayor. Despite this unremarkable pedigree, she had married into a fine old family in the city on the strength of her looks. In this picture she was tilting her head demurely to the side, but her sloe-eyed gaze held that gleam that beautiful women have when they know they’re invincible.

Sarah knew that Granny had been asked to stay upstairs to make things easier on everyone. It was too bad; social activity had been her lifeblood. Mrs. Kobayashi sympathized too. “Poor thing,” she had said. “It would be so much healthier if she could chatter away in a public bathhouse, instead of being cooped up there all alone.” But theirs was more of a philosophical pity, for they also understood Mrs. Nishimura’s position. As Sarah’s mother used to say: What can you do? There was no perfect solution, and right now it was Mrs. Nishimura’s turn to bloom at the expense of someone else.

The old woman never let on that her circumstances weren’t ideal. “Who wants to run about at my age?” she bragged. “I’m perfectly happy in my little kingdom upstairs. Surrounded by family, waited on hand and foot, maa maa, I’m incredibly lucky…”

Sarah scrutinized the photograph again. Mrs. Asaki, glancing over to see what was taking so much time, gave a little laugh of recognition. “I was young then,” she said.

In college, Sarah had learned that history was the study of power rising and power falling. Sitting here, leafing through the pages of another woman’s life, she felt the truth of this and was humbled. It occurred to her that her own past-the trio of her mother and grandmother and herself that had once seemed so extraordinary, strong and shining like the sun-was hardly unique. Countless other suns, like her great-aunt’s, had risen and fallen as a matter of course, each with its own forgotten story, its own poignance.

Sarah found her aunt alone in the kitchen, making preparations for dinner. “I’m just finishing up this side dish,” she told Sarah, in apology for cooking in the presence of a guest. She was sautéing a combination of julienned carrots, hijiki seaweed, and fried tofu skin. It looked identical to the dish Mrs. Kobayashi often made, but this would have much less soy sauce and sugar. Mrs. Kobayashi disparagingly referred to it as “Kyoto flavor.”

Before going off to undress, Sarah leaned against the kitchen doorjamb and watched her aunt. The radio was on, a plastic Hello Kitty model long outgrown by Momoko and Yashiko. For years now, it had been tuned to the same classical station that played everything from the Western melodies of Strauss and Puccini to the elegant notes of koto, punctuated by a shamisen’s bitter twangs.

In general, Mrs. Nishimura seemed unchanged. Under her apron she wore a blouse of pastel yellow, with a round collar that had embroidered daisies on it. She still wore the short bob, although Sarah could see it was professionally cut at a salon, with graduated layers and the subtlest of brownish highlights to indicate she was coloring her roots.

But on closer inspection, Sarah did sense something of the change her grandmother had mentioned. That virginal, ethereal quality was gone. As Mrs. Nishimura reached for a bottle of seasoning, she leaned across the counter with an unfamiliar physical brio that reminded Sarah, for an unsettling moment, of her own mother.

She stared, but Mrs. Nishimura made no more surprising moves. Stirring quietly at the stove, she was once again the aunt of Sarah’s childhood: a gentle figure who never frowned or grimaced, who hovered with a damp cloth for wiping children’s fingers.

An early memory floated up in her mind. She was six years old; they were walking to the park on a winter afternoon. She was in the middle, between her aunt and Momoko-Yashiko wasn’t born yet. “Hold on to Big Sister’s hand, for safety,” Mrs. Nishimura had told Momoko. As young as she was, Sarah knew her aunt was doing this to flatter her; any other adult would have walked in the middle, keeping one child on either side. Little Momoko obediently clutched Sarah’s hand with her mittened one, looking up at her with a chubby, trusting face framed by a knitted hood with animal ears. Sarah felt a rush of importance, followed by overwhelming love for her aunt. The three of them held hands and strolled down the sidewalk. “Ten ten ten-ten koro rin…,” Mrs. Nishimura chanted softly as they swung their joined hands back and forth.

It had struck Sarah, with a small child’s intuitiveness, that no one but her aunt could have been capable of such sensitivity. Looking back now, she wondered if even then she had sensed a kinship between them, for they both knew how it felt to be on the outside.

“Sarah-chan,” her aunt said, “are you finding this Japanese weather too chilly?”

“Not at all, Auntie. Today’s quite warm, I thought.”

“Yes, you’re right!” said Mrs. Nishimura. “It’s unseasonably warm.”

Talking to her aunt was slightly awkward, as always. On a purely technical level, she wasn’t used to making allowances for Sarah’s simple Japanese vocabulary. Mrs. Kobayashi had the knack for putting complex ideas into simple terms. Nuclear physics, for instance, became “the rules of science involving-” followed by an exploding sound, with both hands outlining an enormous H-bomb mushroom. “Right, right!” Sarah would say, laughing and nodding. But her aunt would use the term nuclear physics, then be at a loss if Sarah didn’t understand. So she usually stuck to the simplest of conversational topics.