In what way is Japan described?

 The post-war Japan in which Makiko and her son live is
described in the present tense, interspersed with the past tense to describe Makiko’s
memories. Yoshitsune, for example, is a living presence for Makiko, a memory she
perceives "in the honeyed light of prewar years" (paragraph 60). But he is in the past,
and her son is "racing ahead" of her. Though she continues to blend the past and the
present in her consciousness, she by no means idealizes everything. Thus she recalls an
incident with her husband that made her annoyed and another incident in which she was
afraid of him. The strengths of the present, as shown in the present tense, are clearly
becoming stronger and stronger in her mind, and consequently the past tense will fade
away more and more. The story’s last two paragraphs demonstrate Waters’s blending of
tenses, beginning with the past but then, in the four last sentences, moving into the
future.