Mrs. Ito seemed troubled. Her neighbor’s confusion over the window had unsettled her. It was clear, she said, that the woman was not reliable. A day passed and Mrs. Ito thought about it some more. Over the years, her neighbor had visited her home — on the third floor — so surely she must know where Mrs. Ito lived. It was, Mrs. Ito convinced herself, just a lapse.

A few days before the dance, Mrs. Ito got a phone call from her lunch companion, Mr. Kinoshita. After being cooped up in his apartment for what seemed like years, he couldn’t wait to go the dance and checked with Madame Ito to make sure of the date. She had stopped going decades ago, after her children grew up. When the danchi swelled with children, the dance was held in a large park, not in the small plaza where it was now taking place.

“This now,” she said, “is nothing.”

People began gathering after sunset. They danced in circles around a stage in the middle of the plaza, illuminated by hanging red and white lanterns.

Mr. Kinoshita slowly pushed his silver chair through the crowd, resting on a bench under an elm tree. He faced away from the women dancing on the stage, the ones wearing the kimonos he had longed to see, just as he had turned away from the jazz singer. When introduced to someone new, he simply said, “The only thing I have left is the Eurotunnel.”

It was getting dark. Crickets were singing, the harbingers of autumn in Japan. Deeper into the danchi, toward Mrs. Ito’s apartment, the door of the dead 67-year-old man was still taped over, the smell refusing to disappear. Deeper still, past the deserted pool and the playground where her daughter used to play, Mrs. Ito’s window was visible, faintly, in the night.

The paper screen was closed, waiting for her to slide it back open in the morning. ☐