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In Imamiyai Park the boys are playing dodge-ball, a new American game. Their voices float indistinctly on the soft summer evening. Behind them tall poplars rise up through the low-lying dusk, intercepting the last of the sun’s rays, which dazzle the leaves with white and gold.

Makiko can hardly believe her son, Toshi, belongs with these older boys. Seven years old! Once his growth had seemed commensurate with the passage of time. These last few years, however, with the war and surrender, the changes have come too fast, skimming her consciousness like skipped pebbles over water.

Makiko is grateful the war is over. But she cannot ignore a niggling sense that Japan’s surrender has spawned a new threat more subtle, more diffuse. She can barely articulate it, even to herself; feels unmoored, buffeted among invisible forces that surge up all around her. Her son’s thin body, as if caught up in these energies, is rapidly lengthening. Look! Within that circle in the dirt he is dodging, he is feinting; his body twists with an unfamiliar grace, foreshadowing that of a young man.

Toshi’s growth is abetted by a new lunch program at school, subsidized by the American government, which has switched, with dizzying speed, from enemy to ally. Each day now, her son comes home with alien food in his stomach: bread, cheese, bottled milk. Last week, in the pocket of his shorts, Makiko found a cube of condensed peanut butter (an American dessert, Toshi explained) that he had meant to save for later. It was coated with lint from his pocket, which he brushed off, ignoring her plea to “get rid of that filthy thing.”

Each day now, Toshi comes home with questions she cannot answer: Who was Magellan? How do you say “my name is Toshi” in English? How do you play baseball?

Makiko shows him the ball games her own mother taught her. She bounces an imaginary ball, chanting a ditty passed down from the Edo Period:

yellow topknots
of the Portuguese wives

spiraled like seashells
and stuck atop their heads

hold one up, to your ear
shake it up and down

one little shrunken brain
is rattling inside

In the old days, she tells him, they used to put something inside the rubber balls—maybe a scrap of iron, she wasn’t sure—that made a rattling noise. Toshi, too old now for this sort of amusement, sighs with impatience.

Just four years ago, Toshi’s head had been too big for his body—endearingly out of proportion, like the head of a stuffed animal. Even then he had a manly, square-jawed face, not unlike that of a certain city council candidate displayed on election posters at the time. “Mr. Magistrate,” her husband, Yoshitsune, nicknamed the boy. Before he went off to war, Yoshitsune and their son had developed a little routine. “Oyi, Toshi! Are you a man?” Yoshitsune would prompt in his droll tone, using the word otoko, with its connotations of male bravery, strength, and honor. He asked this question several times a day, often before neighbors and friends.

“Hai, Father! I am a man!” little Toshi would cry, stiffening at soldierly attention as he had been coached, trembling with eagerness to please. His short legs, splayed out from the knees as if buckling under the weight of his head, were still dimpled with baby fat.

“Maaa! An excellent, manly answer!” the grown-ups praised, through peals of laughter.

Makiko had laughed too, a faint constriction in her throat, for recently Yoshitsune had remarked to her, “When I’m out fighting in the Pacific, that’s how I’m going to remember him.” After that she began watching their child closely, trying to memorize what Yoshitsune was memorizing. Later, when her husband was gone, it comforted her to think that the same images swam into both their minds at night. Even today, Toshi’s three-year-old figure is vivid in her mind. On the other hand, she has not fully absorbed the war years, still shrinks from those memories and all that has followed.

Foreigners, for instance, are now a familiar sight. American Army jeeps with beefy red arms dangling out the windows roar down Kagane Boulevard, the main thoroughfare just east of Toshi’s school. “Keep your young women indoors,” the neighbors say. Makiko has watched an occasional soldier offering chocolates or peanuts to little children, squatting down to their level, holding out the treat—it seems to her they all have hairy arms—as if to a timid cat. Just yesterday Toshi came home, smiling broadly and carrying chocolates—not one square but three. Bile had surged up in Makiko’s throat, and before she knew it, she had struck them right out of his hand and onto the kitchen floor. “How could you!” she choked as Toshi, stunned, burst into sobs. “How could you?! Your father, those men killed your father!”

This evening Makiko has come to the park with a small box of caramels, bought on the black market with some of the money she was hoarding to buy winter yarn. “In the future,” she will tell him, “if you want something so badly, you come to me. Ne? Not to them.”

On a bench in the toddlers’ section, now deserted, she waits for her son to finish his game with the other boys. All the other mothers have gone home to cook dinner. The playground equipment has not been maintained since the beginning of the war. The swing set is peeling with rust; the free-standing animals—the ram, the pig, the rooster—rest on broken-down springs, and their carnival paint has washed away, exposing more rusted steel.

Ara maaa! Her Toshi has finally been hit! Makiko feels a mother’s pang. He is crossing the line to the other side now, carrying the ball. Makiko notes the ease with which the fallen one seems to switch roles in this game, heaving the ball at his former teammates without the slightest trace of allegiance.

*  *  *  *  *

This year, Makiko is allowing Toshi to light the incense each evening before the family altar. He seems to enjoy prayer time much more now that he can use matches. She also regularly changes which photograph of her husband is displayed beside the miniature gong. This month’s photograph shows Yoshitsune in a long cotton yukata, smoking under the ginkgo tree in the garden. Sometimes, in place of a photograph, she displays an old letter or one of his silk scent bags, still fragrant after a bit of massaging. The trick is to keep Toshi interested, to present his father in the light of constant renewal.

“Just talk to him inside your mind,” she tells her son. “He wants to know what you’re learning in school, what games you’re playing. Just like any other father, ne? Don’t leave him behind, don’t ignore him, just because he’s dead.” She wonders if Toshi secretly considers his father a burden, making demands from the altar, like a cripple from a wheelchair.

“Your father’s very handsome in this picture, ne?” she says tonight. Within the lacquered frame, her son’s father glances up from lighting a cigarette, a bemused half smile on his face, as if he is waiting to make a wry comment.

Toshi nods absently. Frowning, he slashes at the matchbox with the expert flourish of a second-grade boy. The match rips into flames.

“Answer properly! You’re not a little baby anymore.”

“Hai, Mother.” Toshi sighs with a weary, accommodating air, squaring his shoulders in a semblance of respectful attention. Makiko remembers with sorrow the big head, the splayed legs of her baby boy.

It amazes her that Toshi has no memory of the routine he once performed with his father. “What do you remember of him?” she prods every so often, hoping to dislodge some new memory. But all that Toshi remembers of his father is being carried on one arm before a sunny window.

“Maaa, what a wonderful memory!” Makiko encourages him each time. “It must have been a very happy moment!”

When would this have taken place: which year, which month? Would even Yoshitsune have remembered it, this throwaway moment that, inexplicably, has outlasted all the others in their son’s mind? She tries conjuring it up, as if the memory is her own. For some reason she imagines autumn, the season Yoshitsune sailed away: October 1942. How the afternoon sun would seep in through the nursery window, golden, almost amber, advancing with the slow, viscous quality of Tendai honey, overtaking sluggish dust motes and even sound. She wishes Toshi could remember the old view from that upstairs window: a sea of gray-tiled roofs drowsing in the autumn haze, as yet unravaged by the fires of war.

“I’m done,” Toshi says.

“What! Already? Are you sure?”

“Hai, Mother.” Already heading for the dining room, where supper lies waiting on the low table, he slides back the shoji door in such a hurry that it grates on its grooves. Makiko considers calling him back—his prayers are getting shorter and shorter—but the incident with the chocolates is still too recent for another reprimand.

She follows him into the dining room. “A man who forgets his past,” she quotes as she scoops rice into his bowl, “stays at the level of an animal.” Toshi meets her eyes with a guilty, resentful glance. “Go on,” she says blandly, “eat it while it’s hot.”

Toshi falls to. In order to supplement their meager rice ration, Makiko continues to mix in chopped kabura radishes—which at least resemble rice in color—as she did during the war. Sometimes she switches to chopped turnips. At first, before the rationing became strict, Toshi would hunch over his rice bowl with his chopsticks, fastidiously picking out one bit of vegetable after another and discarding it onto another plate. Now, he eats with gusto. It cuts her, the things he has grown used to. As a grown man he will reminisce over all the wrong things, things that should never have been a part of his childhood: this shameful pauper food; blocks of peanut paste covered with lint; enemy soldiers amusing themselves by tossing chocolate and peanuts to children.

Later, Toshi ventures a question. Makiko has noticed that nighttime—the black emptiness outside, the hovering silence—still cows him a little, stripping him of his daytime cockiness. After his good-night bow, Toshi remains kneeling in bowing position on the tatami floor. He says, “I was thinking, Mama, about how I’m seven—and how I only remember things that happened after I was three. So that means I’ve forgotten a whole half of my life. Right?”

“That’s right,” Makiko says. He is looking up at her, his brows puckered in a look of doleful concentration that reminds her of his younger days. “But it’s perfectly normal, Toshi-kun. It’s to be expected.”

He is still thinking. “So when I get older,” he says, “am I going to keep on forgetting? Am I going to forget you, too?”

Makiko reaches out and strokes his prickly crew cut. “From this age on,” she says, “you’re going to remember everything, Toshi-kun. Nothing more will ever be lost.”

*  *  *  *  *

In the middle of the night, Makiko awakes from a dream in which her husband, Yoshitsune, is hitting her with a flyswatter. She lies paralyzed under her futon, outrage buzzing in her chest. Details from the dream wash back into her mind: Yoshitsune’s smile, distant and amused; the insolent way he wielded the swatter, as if she were hardly worth the effort.

A blue sheet of moonlight slips in through the space between two sliding panels.

In the first year or two after Yoshitsune’s death, this sort of thing would happen often, and not always in the form of dreams. There were times—but hardly ever anymore; why tonight?—when, in the middle of washing the dishes or sweeping the alley, some small injustice from her past, long forgotten, would rise up in Makiko’s mind, blotting out all else till her heart beat hard and fast. Like that time, scarcely a month after their wedding, when Yoshitsune had run into his old girlfriend at Nanjin Station and made such a fuss: his absurd, rapt gaze; the intimate timbre of his voice as he inquired after her welfare.

And there was the time—the only time in their entire marriage—when Yoshitsune had grabbed Makiko by the shoulders and shaken her hard. He’d let go immediately, but not before she felt the anger in his powerful hands and her throat had choked up with fear. That, too, was early on in the marriage, before Makiko learned to tolerate his sending sizable sums of money home to his mother each month.

What is to be done with such memories?

They get scattered, left behind. Over these past few years, more pleasant recollections have taken the lead, informing all the rest, like a flock of birds, heading as one body along an altered course of nostalgia.

She has tried so hard to remain true to the past. But the weight of her need must have been too great: her need to be comforted, her need to provide a legacy for a small, fatherless boy. Tonight she senses how far beneath the surface her own past has sunk, its outline distorted by deceptively clear waters.

*  *  *  *  *

Toshi has been counting the days till Tanabata Day. A small festival is being held at the riverbank—the first one since the war. It will be a meager affair, of course, nothing like it used to be: no goldfish scooping, no soba noodles, no fancy fireworks. However, according to the housewives at the open-air market, there will be a limited number of sparklers (the nicest kind anyway, Makiko tells her son) and traditional corn grilled with soy sauce, which can be purchased out of each family’s ration allowance.

Because of a recent after-dark incident near Kubota Temple involving an American soldier and a young girl, Makiko’s younger brother has come by this evening to accompany them to the festival. Noboru is a second-year student at the local university.

“Ne, Big Sister! Are you ready yet?” he keeps calling from the living room. Makiko is inspecting Toshi’s nails and the back of his collar.

“Big Sister,” Noboru says, looking up as Makiko finally appears in the doorway, “your house is too immaculate, I get nervous every time I come here!” He is sitting stiffly on a floor cushion, sipping homemade persimmon tea.

“Well,” Makiko answers, “I hate filth.” She tugs down her knee-length dress. She has switched, like most women, to Western dresses—they require less fabric—but it makes her irritable, having to expose her bare calves in public.

“Aaa,” says young Noboru from his floor cushion, “but I, for one, am fascinated by it. The idea of it, I mean. What’s that old saying—‘Nothing grows in a sterile pond’? Just think, Big Sister, of the things that come out of filth. A lotus, for example. Or a pearl. Just think: a pearl’s nothing more than a grain of dirt covered up by oyster fluid! And life itself, Big Sister, billions of years ago—taking shape for the first time in the primordial muck!”

“Maa maa, Nobo-kun.” She sighs, double-checking her handbag for coin purse, ration tickets, and handkerchief. “You seem to be learning some very interesting concepts at the university.”

Toshi is waiting by the front door in shorts and a collared shirt, impatiently rolling the panel open and then shut, open and then shut.

Finally, they are on their way, strolling down the narrow alley in the still, muggy evening. The setting sun angles down on the east side of the alley, casting a pink and orange glow on the charred wooden lattices where shadows reach, like long heads of snails, from the slightest of protrusions. In the shadowed side of the alley, one of the buck-toothed Yamada daughters ladles water from a bucket onto the asphalt around her door, pausing, with a good-evening bow, to let them pass. The water, colliding with warm asphalt, has burst into a smell of many layers: asphalt, earth, scorched wood, tangy dragon’s beard moss over a mellower base of tree foliage; prayer incense and tatami straw, coming from the Yamadas’ half-open door; and mixed in with it all, some scent far back from Makiko’s own childhood that falls just short of definition.

“We Japanese,” Noboru is saying, “must reinvent ourselves.” There are, he tells her, many such discussions now at the university. “We must change to fit the modern world,” he says. “We mustn’t allow ourselves to remain an occupied nation.” He talks of the new constitution, of the new trade agreements. Makiko has little knowledge of politics. She is amused—disquieted, too—by this academic young man, who before the war was a mere boy loping past her window with a butterfly net over his shoulder.

“Fundamental shifts…,” Noboru is saying, “…outdated pyramidal structures.” Lately he has taken to wearing a hair pomade with an acrid metallic scent. It seems to suggest fervor, fundamental shifts.

“Toshi-kun!” Makiko calls. “Don’t go too far.” The boy stops running. He walks, taking each new step in exaggerated slow motion.

“So much change!” she says to Noboru as she tugs at her cotton dress. “And so fast. Other countries had centuries to do it in.”

“Soh soh, Big Sister!” Noboru says. “Soh soh. But we have no choice, that’s a fact. You jettison from a sinking ship if you want to survive.”

The pair approach Mr. Watanabe, watering his potted morning glories in the twilight. Holding his watering can in one hand, the old man gives them a genteel bow over his cane. “Yoshitsune-san,” he murmurs politely, “Makiko-san.” He then turns back to his morning glories, bending over them with the tenderness of a mother with a newborn.

“Poor Watanabe-san, ne,” Noboru whispers. “He gets more and more confused every time we see him.”

Yes, poor Mr. Watanabe, Makiko thinks. Bit by bit he is being pulled back in, like a slowing planet, toward some core, some necessary center of his past. Laden with memory, his mind will never catch up to Noboru’s new constitution or those new trade agreements, or even the implications of that billboard with English letters—instructions for arriving soldiers?—rising above the blackened rooftops and blocking his view of the Tendai hills.

Oddly, Mr. Watanabe’s mistake has triggered a memory from the past: Makiko is strolling with her husband this summer evening. For one heartbeat she experiences exactly how things used to be—that feel of commonplace existence, before later events imposed their nostalgia—with a stab of physical recognition, impossible to call up again. Then it is gone, like the gleam of a fish, having stirred up all the waters around her.

They walk on in silence. “Toshi-kun!” she calls out again. “Slow down.” Toshi pauses, waiting for them; he swings at the air with an imaginary bat. “Striku! Striku!” he hisses.

It occurs to Makiko that this war has suspended them for too long in an artificial, unsustainable state of solidarity. For a while, everyone had clung together in the bomb shelter off Nijiya Street, thinking the same thoughts, breathing in the same damp earth and the same warm, uneasy currents made by bodies at close range. But that is over now.

Makiko thinks of her future. She is not so old. She is still full of life and momentum. There is no doubt that she will pass through this period and on into whatever lies beyond it, but at a gradually slowing pace; a part of her, she knows, will lag behind in the honeyed light of prewar years.

“Toshi-kun!” she cries. “Wait!” Her son is racing ahead, his long shadow sweeping the sunlit fence as sparrows flutter up from charred palings.

*  *  *  *  *

At her first glimpse of the festival, Makiko’s stomach sinks. Although she has come to this festival for Toshi’s sake only—she herself having no interest in children’s festivals, not having attended a Tanabata Night fair since her own teenage years—she is nonetheless taken unawares by the difference between the bright, colorful booths of her childhood and what now stands before her: four poles in the earth, supporting a crude black canopy made from some kind of industrial tarpaulin. A few tattered red paper lanterns, probably dug out from someone’s attic, hang forlornly from the corners. Under this cover, corn is roasting on makeshift grills made from oil barrels split lengthwise. It puts Makiko in mind of a refugee tent, the kind she associates with undeveloped countries somewhere in Southeast Asia, where natives and stray dogs alike mill about waiting to be fed. The shock of this impression, coming as it does at this unguarded moment, awakens anew the shame of defeat.

“Ohhh-i!” Toshi yells out to one of his friends, and almost scampers off into the crowd before Makiko grabs him.

“Well,” Makiko says, turning to her younger brother.

“That’s the spirit!” Noboru says heartily, surveying the crowd. “Fall seven times, get up eight! Banzai! Banzai, for national rebuilding!” He proclaims this partly for Makiko’s benefit and partly for that of a pretty young girl who is approaching them, no doubt a classmate of his. She has short hair with a permanent wave, like that of an American movie actress.

Standing in line with the young couple and a fidgety Toshi, Makiko wonders if the time will ever come when she can see a postwar substitute without the shadow of its former version.

But now, despite herself, she is distracted by the nearness of the corn, sizzling and crackling as the soy sauce and sugar drip into the flames. Her mouth waters. And when she finally takes her first bite, she is amazed to find it tastes exactly the way it did in her childhood, burnt outside and chewy inside. The surprise and relief of it bring tears to her eyes, and she chews vigorously to hide the sudden twisting of her features.

“This corn is so good, ne, Mama?” Toshi keeps saying, looking up from his rationed four centimeters of corncob. “This sure tastes good, ne?” The joy on his face, caught in the red glow of paper lanterns, is like a tableau.

“Yes, it’s good,” she says with pride, as if this is her own creation, her own legacy that she is handing down. “We ate food like this when your father was alive.” She watches her son gnawing off the last of the kernels, sucking out the soy sauce from the cob. She hands him her own ration, from which she has taken but one bite.

“What a greedy piglet,” Noboru teases, pretending to box his nephew’s ears. Then he turns serious, remembering the girl beside him with the permanent wave. He is impressing her with his knowledge of astronomy. “Do you know which stars represent the separated lovers in that Tanabata legend?” he asks.

“I remember my father once pointing them out to me,” the girl says. They are both gazing up at the sky, even though it is too early for stars. The girl gives a long sigh. “I’ve always loved that story,” she says. “It’s so sad and romantic, how once a year on Tanabata Night they’re allowed to cross the gulf of the Milky Way, just for a few minutes, and be reunited again.”

“The Western names for those stars,” Noboru murmurs to her, “are Altair and Vega.”

*  *  *  *  *

Later that night Makiko stands outside on her veranda, fanning herself with a paper uchiwa. Toshi is already asleep. The night garden is muggy; the mosquitoes are out in full force. She can hear their ominous whine from the hydrangea bush, in between the rasping of crickets, but they no longer target her as they did in her youth. She is thinner now, her skin harder from the sun, her blood watered down from all the rationing.

What a nice festival it turned out to be. More somber than in the old days, yet with remnants of its old charm. With the coming of the dark, the tent’s harsh outlines had melted away and the red lanterns seemed to glow brighter. Shadowy forms gathered at the river’s edge: adults bending over their children, helping them to hold out sparklers over the glassy water. The sparklers sputtered softly in the dark, shedding white flakes of light. Makiko had watched from a distance; Toshi was old enough, he had insisted, to do it by himself. She had remarked to Noboru how there is something in everyone that responds to fireworks: so fleeting, so lovely in the dark.

Right now the stars are out, although the surrounding rooftops obscure most of the night sky except for a full moon. She had noticed the moon earlier, at dusk, opaque and insubstantial. Now, through shifting moisture in the air, it glows bright and strong, awash with light, pulsing with light.

Surely tonight’s festival owed its luster to all that lay beneath, to all those other evenings of her past that emit a lingering phosphorescence through tonight’s surface. Which long-ago evenings exactly?…but they are slowly losing shape, dissolving within her consciousness.

Perhaps Toshi will remember this night. Perhaps it will rise up again, once he is grown, via some smell, some glint of light, bringing indefinable texture and emotion to a future summer evening. As will his memory of being carried by his father before an open window, or a time when he prayed before his father’s picture.