The ministry said her parents, Shigeru and Sakie Yokota, 81 and 78, met Ms. Kim for several days last week, though it provided few details. Ms. Yokota’s former husband, Kim Young-nam, a South Korean who was also kidnapped by the North, might have also been present, according to Japan’s Kyodo News Agency.

The Asahi Shimbun, a major Japanese newspaper, quoted unnamed government officials as saying that Ms. Kim’s child — the Yokotas’ great-grandchild — was also present. The age and sex of the child were not provided.

Japanese news media said the meeting was agreed upon during informal talks between Japanese and North Korean officials this month in Shenyang, China. Those talks, on the sidelines of a meeting of the two nations’ Red Cross societies, were aimed at restarting an official dialogue between the two estranged nations, which was frozen after North Korea launched a large rocket over Japan in December 2012.

Image Kim Eun-gyong in Pyongyang, North Korea, in 2006. She met her grandparents in secret in the Mongolian capital last week. Credit... Kyodo News, via Associated Press

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan has reached out to North Korea, sending a top aide to Pyongyang, the North’s capital, last year in an effort to resolve lingering questions over the fate of the abductees. A breakthrough on this issue could open the way for the resumption of talks toward normalizing relations. Those talks were disrupted a decade ago, when North Korea first admitted to Junichiro Koizumi, then Japan’s prime minister and Mr. Abe’s political mentor, that it had kidnapped 13 Japanese citizens.