Always Coming, Never Here

A woman inherited a house that had belonged to her grandmother. The house was crowded in, surrounded by other houses, but it was shaped like a tsu or a ko, and it had tranquil gardens in and around it so you never noticed the closeness of the neighbors. All the walls on the house were really sliding doors. Each door had three layers. The outer layer was like a window, the center layer was a screen, and the inner layer was made of brown wood and white ricepaper. In the late summer the song of the cicadas was deafening.