Sarah rolled open the slatted gate and paused on the stone step. A faint breeze wafted against her skin, still overheated from the bath.

Caught in the knobby branches of the Ichiyoshis’ pine tree, heavy with white light and almost touchable, was a full moon. “Oh, look!” Sarah said. “The moon.”

“Aaa, isn’t it pretty.”

They were silent awhile, looking up.

“I look at the moon a lot,” Mrs. Nishimura said, and a certain quality in her voice made Sarah take notice. “Like this, with the branches silhouetted on it. In traditional art, you know, the moon’s never bare. It’s always half-hidden behind branches or clouds.” Sarah knew the art to which she was referring. She, too, had been affected by those old Japanese tableaus, by the sorrowful beauty of a shining thing glimpsed, only partially, through a layer of impediments.

Halfway down the lane, she looked back. Her aunt was standing by the gate as she had since Sarah’s childhood, waiting to return her wave.

Mrs. Nishimura’s concert took place on a still, overcast Sunday afternoon. Sarah and her grandmother took a taxi to the matinee. Mr. Nishimura was working and Yashiko, having already attended the opening concert, had somewhere else to be. Mrs. Asaki was too old for these kinds of outings.

They sat quietly while the seats filled up around them. The orchestra made discordant notes as it warmed up. The audience was mostly middle-aged and older since the concert was a retrospective, held in honor of a songwriter who had written many of the classic tunes of the postwar period. War nostalgia was popular now. There was always something on television about a restaurant serving some wartime dish or a middle-aged person being tearfully reunited with a childhood friend from the occupation era. Sarah, who remembered how fondly her mother used to say “our generation, growing up after the war,” understood this need to look back.

She wondered what her mother would have thought of this state-of-the-art auditorium. She could picture her alert eyes looking about, taking in the high acoustical ceilings, the discreet spotlights built into the walls. “They didn’t spare any expense, did they,” she would have said, “but I still liked the small, dark building from my childhood.”

Not so long ago Sarah would have shared this thought with her grandmother, tossing out her mother’s name as if she were still one of them. But it felt unnatural now, even forced. She was beginning to like having her mother to herself, like a private talisman. Her grandmother had her talisman too, and the two versions would become less and less alike as the years wore on.

She flipped idly through the program. Her knowledge of Chinese characters was spotty, so she recognized only the title-“Songs That Got Us Through”-as well as the words Paris, Berlin, and New York. Mrs. Kobayashi had mentioned that the choir performed abroad on occasion, though not everyone went. Many of them were homemakers with children, and their domestic duties came first.

Sarah put down her program and glanced over at her grandmother, who looked demure and poised in her mink collar. “They didn’t spare any expense, did they?” she said.

“Soh, they certainly didn’t.”

The spotlights caught the instruments down in the orchestra pit, bringing out the expensive gleam of polished wood and brass. This is a real choir, thought Sarah, a choir to be taken seriously. Her aunt must have worked hard-and kept it to herself, so as not to give her family the impression of neglect. Not that it stopped Mrs. Asaki from saying things like, “It’s a nice life she has. Singing like a bird while her old mother eats leftovers. But maaa, she loves it, so what can you do?”

Now the instruments died down and the lights dimmed overhead. Sarah leaned forward in anticipation of her aunt’s entrance. And in that moment, she knew with certainty that she was going to be all right on her own. Her mother had even said it: Once you’ve come first, it stays a part of you. This moment, right now, was the strongest she had ever felt: being secure enough in her own powers to enjoy someone else about to have her day in the sun.

The choir began filing onstage, one by one, unassuming and matronly in their navy-blue dresses. They lacked the seasoned stage presence of professional performers; one sensed these were ordinary women who, like the rest of the audience, had been personally affected by the songs they were about to sing. From the rising power of the clapping, Sarah knew the audience sensed this, too, and was responding to it. The choir flowed smoothly into its assigned lines, like a marching band. “Front row,” Mrs. Kobayashi whispered, leaning over to point her out. “Over there, third from the left.” And there indeed was Mrs. Nishimura, looking small but composed.

The conductor strode in swiftly to the center of the stage, bowed deeply, then turned his back to the audience. He raised his baton and waited. The clapping died down. Someone coughed. Sarah turned her head to look up at the audience: row upon row of pale faces rose up in the darkness, waiting. On this threshold, she felt a deep, sharp joy for her aunt and also a fore-shadowing of what lay ahead for the three of them: not the shining, laughing summers of her mother’s time but a tender new season that would resonate, like those bittersweet Japanese tableaus, with all the complexities of time’s passage.

The first soprano was a lone voice, barely audible. Then the others-second soprano, then first alto (that was Mrs. Nishimura’s section)-joined in with steadily gathering force, and finally the second alto, its heft overtaking all the others. Their voices swelled to a crescendo, then paused, the notes spreading out like ink in water.

They sang of yellow rapeseed flowers, blooming by the roadside in spring. Sarah’s mother had sung this song to her when she was little. Sarah hadn’t learned until much later that it was about a bomb site in Nagasaki. Today, transformed by the orchestra and the sheer power of voices, its familiar childish words were elevated as she had never heard them: rich, omniscient. Small flowers are nodding, they sang out with one voice. Cheery and bright…

Sarah thought of young Aunt Masako standing alone amidst flapping laundry, singing out to an empty sky. She thought of the strange power of thwarted emotions. She thought how pervasive thwarted love was, how it lay beneath so much of life’s beauty. We let them ferment, her mother had said, till you can’t tell them apart.

On a hushed, sunny afternoon when the last of the red maple leaves were drifting down from the trees, Mrs. Asaki came tapping at the kitchen door. As always, she had an official excuse for coming: to pay her respects at her ancestors’ family altar. According to Mrs. Kobayashi, the old lady paid her respects quite regularly. “She looks forward to coming here,” Mrs. Kobayashi had confided to Sarah. “Poor thing.”

While her grandmother made preparations in the kitchen, Sarah readied the kotatsu in the family room. She brought over an extra floor cushion from the stack in the corner-it was autumn, so the cotton covers were a warm shade of rust-and turned on the heat switch under the table. She glanced at Granny Asaki, who stood hunched before the altar, murmuring under her breath and massaging her tasseled prayer beads with practiced, efficient hand movements that spoke of a lifetime of prayer.

“A little offering for your mama,” she said afterward, nodding at the envelope on the altar.

“Thank you, Granny! Thank you so much.” She lifted the kotatsu blanket. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” she asked as her great-aunt lowered her frail limbs onto the floor cushion. “So sunny and warm.”

“Oh no, it’s not too warm,” the old woman said brightly, reaching under the table to feel the heater. “The temperature’s just right.”