After the formal visits of the first day, the two houses kept mostly to themselves. They did, however, drop by almost daily to share freshly cut flowers from their gardens, or an extra eel fillet bought on sale, or half of a designer melon received from a visitor. On certain evenings, Mrs. Kobayashi had Sarah walk over a platter of tempura or pot stickers, hot and crisp from the frying oil. These were greeted with great enthusiasm because—as Mrs. Kobayashi explained privately—the cooking over there was not so good. The Asaki household followed the old Kyoto tradition, using seasonings so subtle they were practically flavorless. (Mrs. Kobayashi, the Kobe native, went on to say that Kyoto people were notorious for donning beautiful silks in public but making do with substandard cuisine in private.) Sometimes Mrs. Asaki, laden down with shopping bags and beaming—she loved going downtown, where all the action was—tapped on the Kobayashis’ kitchen door on her way home and dropped off a French bakery bag filled with brioches and frankfurter pastries. But these exchanges lasted only a few minutes, and the women rarely took off their shoes and entered each other’s houses.

“How come we never sit around and talk, like we did the first day?” Sarah asked. Deep down, she knew why. But a childish part of her was disappointed, even petulant; she had been hoping for a constant round of social activity.

“Goodness, child. Who has the time! A house doesn’t just run itself,” said Mrs. Kobayashi, laughing.

Mrs. Rexford shot Sarah a glance of warning. “People need boundaries,” she said.

Luckily the children had no such restrictions. Sarah spent hours at the Asaki house. Within that household were two different worlds, one downstairs and one upstairs.

Downstairs was Mrs. Nishimura’s domain—not just during the day but also at night, when she and her husband rolled out their futons in the television room. Unlike the sunny rooms upstairs, the ground floor was tinged with restful green light from the garden. Since the formal dining room was used only for guests, the children gravitated toward the informal eating area that directly adjoined the kitchen. Under the large low table, stacked in tin boxes, were snacks: rice crackers wrapped in seaweed, shrimp crackers, curry-flavored puffs.

In the pale underwater light, Mrs. Nishimura glided in and out of the kitchen bearing delicate glass dishes of flan pudding, or salted rice balls, or crustless sandwich triangles garnished with parsley. “Hai, this is to wipe your fingers,” she told them, offering steaming-hot hand towels rolled into perfect tubes, just like the ones in restaurants. Her conversation was as soft and serene as the leaf-filtered light. “Do you like juice?” she would ask gently, as if Sarah were still seven or eight instead of fourteen. She made conversation by saying things like, “Yashiko’s favorite spoons have Hello Kitty on them, don’t they, Yashiko?”

Sarah sometimes wondered if her aunt switched personas as soon as she was alone with her own children, dropping her outside face and talking in rapid, droll sentences like everyone else. She watched carefully when her aunt was in the company of other women. Although Mrs. Nishimura did switch to an adult-level vocabulary, her demeanor remained as soft and ethereal as with the children. She lacked the impulsive, gossipy spark that the other women seemed to share in abundance. Once, in a private uncharitable moment, Mrs. Rexford sighed sharply to her mother, “I swear! She’s like a blancmange pudding.”

Then Mrs. Rexford had immediately rectified her blunder (“Because blancmange pudding is pure and white, never sullied by anything ugly”) to ensure that there would be no true understanding on her daughter’s part.

“It’s okay, Mama, I know,” said Sarah. “She’s sort of like a Christian Madonna, isn’t she.”

Mrs. Rexford’s relieved eyes met hers. “Exactly,” she said.

It wasn’t as if the two sisters disliked each other. Mrs. Rexford was protective of Mrs. Nishimura, who in turn looked up to her big sister with sincere admiration. But they weren’t everyday friends, the way Mrs. Rexford was with their mother.

When the girls tired of playing downstairs, they climbed up to the second story, where the tatami mats were warm from the sunlight flooding in through the glass wall panels. Sometimes they slid shut the latticed shoji screens against the midday glare. Then a soft, diffused light glowed through the rice paper and created a lovely effect, as if they were living inside a giant paper lantern.

The girls’ room wasn’t a true “room” in the Western sense, since the entire second floor was one enormous room. In place of solid dividing walls, there were fusuma: wall-to-wall partitions of sliding doors that were left open during the day and slid shut at night. These doors were covered on both sides with thick, durable paper whose fibrous surface was interwoven with what looked like delicate strands of green seaweed.

Momoko and Yashiko’s side looked out over the back garden. Much of the view was obscured by the leafy branches of a huge persimmon tree. But Mrs. Asaki’s side, which faced the gravel lane, had a striking panoramic view. Sarah loved standing on her great-aunt’s balcony and gazing out over the tiled triangular roofs: some slate gray, others gray-blue, all sprouting television antennae like feathery weeds. Every so often, this somber expanse was interrupted by the imposing black sweep of a temple roof or the bright vermilion of a tall shrine gate. In the distance, against the green backdrop of the Kyoto hills, a cluster of tall commercial buildings rose up through the summer haze.

From this vantage point she could also look down directly into her grandmother’s garden, as Mrs. Asaki had done that first morning. It gave Sarah an uneasy thrill to realize how clearly visible everything was from here, right down to the pink comic book she had left outside on the veranda. Once Sarah saw her mother and grandmother outside in the garden, crouching side by side near the lilies and pointing excitedly at something in the dirt. She waved but they didn’t see her.

This view reinforced her feeling that the Asaki house was somehow incomplete, in spite of its large size and pleasant rooms. Its soul seemed to look out toward the Kobayashi house instead of inward unto itself. Of course, that might have been her imagination. But Momoko and Yashiko seemed to feel it too. “Big Sister, can we go play at your house now?” one of them invariably asked. Sarah would have preferred to stay. She liked the novelty of an unfamiliar household, and her aunt served frequent snacks. But she yielded to her cousins, whose mute urgency was like that of dogs straining at a leash. She felt, in some strange way, that she owed it to them.

“Don’t stay too long and become a bother,” Mrs. Nishimura called gently from the doorway, waving after her children, who had already broken into a run. And Sarah, lingering behind to return her aunt’s wave, felt once again that odd compunction.

There wasn’t much to play with at the Kobayashi house. It had none of the Asaki house’s amenities: no colored pencils or origami, no finches in hanging cages on the balcony, no ancient turtles floating in mossy stone vats. But when the girls stepped up into the kitchen vestibule and saw Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Rexford doubled up with laughter over their tea or spiritedly gossiping in the kitchen as they chopped vegetables for the evening meal, they always felt they had arrived at the true center of things.

“They sure do love to come here,” Sarah remarked one day after her cousins had gone home. She had spent the last half hour watching them dart between her mother and grandmother, tugging on the women’s sleeves and crying, “Aunt Mama, Aunt Mama, guess what?” and “Look, Granny Kobayashi! Look what I got.”

“Why do they need your attention?” she asked her grandmother irritably. “They see you all the time. They live right here.”

“They’re only allowed to come over when you’re visiting,” Mrs. Kobayashi said.

Sarah opened her mouth, but her mother silenced her with a look.

During these early days, the girl observed many things. She saw that her grandmother never approached the Asaki house, not even to drop off flowers or food (the exception was formal holidays such as New Year’s or O-bon, when both families dined together). She saw that her grandmother never chatted for very long with Mrs. Nishimura unless Mrs. Asaki was also present. Mrs. Kobayashi showed a similar, though lesser, restraint around Momoko and Yashiko, which disappeared if they were all in a group.

But everyone else interacted freely. Mrs. Asaki came visiting—alone, without her daughter—on the pretext of paying respects to her ancestors’ family altar. She lingered afterward for a jolly gossip over tea and slices of red-bean jelly. And Mrs. Rexford had once stayed at the Asaki house for several hours, calling Mrs. Asaki “Auntie” and drinking beer with Mr. Nishimura, although she generally refrained from such visits out of loyalty to her mother.

Sarah wondered if Mrs. Kobayashi and Mrs. Asaki had set up these boundaries right from the start. Perhaps they had silently evolved over the decades. If that first morning was any indication, there must have been slip-ups. For how could such an arrangement not foster, on either side, countless small moments of sorrow and resentment?