Work Text:
New York
Sometimes it feels as if fate carries her along like a great river, shaded by willow trees, rolling past pebbles as smooth as eggs. Sometimes, the same stream is interrupted by cataracts and spiked with rocks sharp as dragon's teeth. "Forget your almanac!" Nobu-san would have said. "Destiny will happen whether your fortune-teller tells you to walk on the left side of the street, or the right!" Yet the same man could see opportunity in a piece of rubble. Was it his destiny to strive? If so, he succeeded. There was a time when she could barely open a newspaper without seeing the words "Iwamura Electric", and Nobu Toshikazu, its President. Even when - even when the Chairman left him, Nobu-san continued to promote the interests of the company both men had founded.
Nitta Sayuri, alone, three years after the Chairman left her behind, opens a newspaper and finds once more Nobu Toshikazu glowering from the page. Was this destiny, or duty?
Conversation is part of the art of the geisha. To know how to cajole and cheer a man weighed down by cares, to laugh with the merry, to provoke, to whisper, to listen, this is an art of understanding. To complement this, for a geisha who lived as Sayuri had done, quietly among powerful men, there is also the art of knowledge. For decades, Sayuri read the newspapers as diligently as she read her almanac. Even now, when age has frosted the glossy black of her hair and lent her skin the translucence of waxed paper, it is part of her daily routine to exit her New York apartment building, walk a couple of blocks, and turn into an alleyway where there is a small cafe. The cafe has a single window with a slatted wooden blind, three miniature tables, and a low counter where Mr. Tawachi prepares toast made with white bread, rice, eggs, and miso soup. Sayuri kneels at the table nearest the counter, and Mr. Tawachi serves her tea, and soup, and lays out the Japanese newspapers. Often, but not always, Sayuri will bring with her the American papers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and sometimes, The Times or Le Monde. At her table, Sayuri studies the ebb and flow of business, politics and power, and most importantly, of the people who wield power. Her teahouse is as likely to host a diplomatic meeting behind closed doors as it is a party of business executives celebrating a successful negotiation: it is her responsibility, and that of the geisha who work with her, to anticipate and provide for both. She has done so for almost all of her adult life, and she does so still, even though the axis around which she had constructed her delicate world of conversation and influence has slipped away.
Although she is alone, it is almost impossible for Sayuri not to draw attention. She has been described as one of the best-known geisha of Gion, of Japan, and then of New York. "This humble person is grateful for your kindness," Sayuri would say, modestly deflecting. She learned to elide words, but draw the eye. She still does. Even here, in her simple indigo kimono, drinking tea, it's not impossible that destiny could still sweep her away.
The young woman who is watching Sayuri, who has been watching Sayuri for weeks, is careful to be unobtrusive, to act with perfect discretion and studied courtesy. She takes tea. She reads the newspapers, online, using a sleek and expensive device. She studies, taking notes with a Swiss fountain pen, for she is attending one of the New York universities. She wears Western dress of business suits, slacks and shirts tailored to her figure, and her make-up is light and professionally applied. A geisha can use her wardrobe, and her art to create beauty: this woman has no need, for she is exquisitely beautiful, and yet - there is a familiarity about the way she walks, the way she knots her belt... She has never looked Sayuri in the face, but Sayuri feels that gaze in the nakedness of the nape of her neck and the studied angle of her wrists. This young woman has presence. Discreet herself, she has not gone unnoticed. Now, in the community of the teahouse, conversations quieten when Sayuri enters. Her dresser takes special care with her kimono; her hairdresser babbles, about nothing. It feels to Sayuri as if the long river of her life hesitates, as if destiny has once again glanced in her direction. Her almanac says, now is an auspicious time to travel and to renew old acquaintance.
Sayuri does not know the name of this young woman, who is so self-possessed and so very beautiful. But in the newspaper she is holding, Sayuri can see her, the same woman. In this photograph an older man, distinguished and distinctive, surrounded by assistants and bodyguards, strides into a ceremonial hall, in Tokyo. He glowers at the camera. Behind him, it is possible to see a woman, who is also the woman in the cafe. There is, too, a younger man, elegantly dressed, with eyes that even in the grained newspaper image are a paler shade than his Japanese features would suggest.
In the upside-down flower and willow world of the geisha, it is girl children who are valued. Girls will carry on the matrilineal line of an okiya, will add to its wealth and care for its traditions. A son born to a geisha will usually be adopted elsewhere. Sayuri, in America, protected and cherished by her danna, had other options. If, for example, she had borne a son, that son could have been raised and educated in her own household. If, for example, he was an only and much loved son, it would have been possible for her to do everything she could, to make sure he was successful, and happy.
Once, the Chairman had taken her son away, and brought him back telling stories of planes and trains. He had seen sumo wrestlers: he had gone fishing; he came back clutching a puppy as enmoured of him as he was of it. He began to write letters, and receive them. He went away again.
"In Japan, I have friends that I do not have here," the Chairman had said, very gently.
The child was happy, but he was, generally, a happy child. That much Sayuri could give him.
Her son grew up. One day, he said to her, very gently, that when he had finished university he was thinking of moving to Japan, just for a year or two, to Kyoto. He had friends, he said. She was not to worry. There were so many opportunities, he would be foolish not to take advantage.
Sayuri felt as if she was choking on a peach pit. But Japan was a booming economy, and her son flourished. Soon, there were references to an up and coming young executive in the newspapers. Then there were photographs, of a man she knew but had not spoken to for decades, and in the background of those photographs Sayuri saw her own son. If, for example, her son had been the son of the Chairman, it might have been Nobu Toshikazu, the company President, the Chairman's greatest friend, his business partner, who mentored that child, just as her big sister Mameha had befriended and trained Sayuri herself.
Sometimes destiny flows lightly, like a river in summer, so that one can laugh and scatter petals and set paper lanterns sailing downstream. Sometimes it is as inescapable as a drum beat.
The woman in the cafe has Mameha's perfect oval face, and her grace of movement. In another world, she might have been the daughter of Sayuri's heart, her best friend's child. This woman has met Sayuri's son. This woman has worked with Nobu Toshikazu.
Sayuri straightens her newspapers with crisp, sharp folds. She puts aside her tea. She stands up, and as Mr. Tawachi rushes to bow her out of the shop, she moves instead to the woman who might be Mameha's daughter. "Good morning," Sayuri says.
"Madame Nitta!" exclaims the woman who might be Mameha's daughter. She bows with such deep respect that she must have learned from childhood the exact placement of her hands and the desired curvature of her neck and back, but she has not yet mastered the imperturbable mask of the geisha. Her blush is real.
"This humble person would like to welcome you," says Sayuri. She herself bows, the elegant and studied bow of the professional, and then she places a card on the table, next to the sprig of budding leaves in its jade vase. It is her own card, with her private telephone line.
"Oh, no!" exclaims the woman, "Madame Nitta, you do me too much honor. I cannot possibly accept such a gift!" The blush has ebbed as quickly as it mounted, and her eyes are wide.
"Please," says Sayuri. "It is the least I can do."
"I can't ever repay you!" says the woman. "This is too much!" She is bowing again, with all the respect that a student owes to their master.
"In Gion," Sayuri says, "I used to take tea several times a week with my best friend. Her name was Mameha. You remind me so much of her - you have her eyes, and her style of wearing a scarf. Tomorrow, perhaps you might join me?"
"Madame," says the young woman, who might or might not be Mameha's daughter. "Thank you. Thank you!"
She has the eagerness of a young girl, but the assurance of an older woman. Modern geisha, Sayuri thinks. She has worked with some of them and met more, women who chose to become geisha, who might work part-time or not at all, who have little debt or none, who were not sold into the profession as Sayuri was. They are women as often seen with a briefcase as a shamisen. In her own teahouse, Sayuri works with two geisha who are studying as well as working. They chose to be geisha from the moment they kneel in front of their dressing table to the moment they unbutton their tabi, and no longer: in the daytime, they are indistinguishable from any other young women racing to classes. If all goes well, one of them will join the diplomatic service and the other will become a professional musician, intersecting with the geisha community, but not immersed in it.
Had Mameha wanted to become a geisha? Had Sayuri? Had destiny marked both of them for the floating world? Sayuri is a fisherman's daughter from a little town called Yoroido, but people have called her one of the best known geisha in the world. What was it about her, when she was a child, that called Mr. Tanaka to sell her to the okiya? Why had the famous artist Uchida been inspired to paint that iconic image of a geisha, in which the young Sayuri is said to be so beautiful and melancholy? Was it her training, her talent, or her extraordinary blue-gray eyes which brought Sayuri the success some people believe she has had? What will happen to this beautiful young woman, with her coursebooks, and the knot in her belt with its distinctive turns and twists, a knot tied by a woman of the floating world?
There are only twenty okiya left in the geisha district of Gion, but here in New York, there are five teahouses where once there were none. Was that destiny, or was it Sayuri, seizing on opportunity?
"I'm too old for opportunity," Sayuri mutters, walking the two blocks to the apartment that been bought for her by her beloved danna, the Chairman. Her route runs alongside Central Park, so that in spring she can wander under the cherry trees, and in fall she can watch the wind-blown leaves pattern the lake. But today she is thinking of the Shiwakawa, the stream that runs through the hanamachi, the geisha quarter in Gion which was once her home, and the way light falls through the branches of the tree onto the water, so that the ripples and patterns on the surface are always in motion. She has always believed there is nowhere as beautiful as the Shiwakawa river in spring, when the cherry blossoms pattern the pale blue of the sky and the river runs young and happy under the trees.
"What is her name?" she asks, that evening
Mr. Sato meets her eyes in the mirror. They have known each other a very long time, Sayuri and her dresser. "Mameryo," he says.
Sayuri gasps. Mr. Sato freezes.
"Keep pulling!" Sayuri says.
Her face in the mirror is unreadable, a geisha's face. Inside - Sayuri should not feel as if lightning has struck the cool stone of the solitary structure of her life, because she had suspected such a thing, must have dreamed it, because in these long nights Sayuri has been dreaming of water, of change, of a new chapter when she had thought she had lain aside the book of her life.
Mr. Sato pulls, tucks, adjusts. Sayuri says, "Why didn't you tell me?"
Mr. Sato ties a perfect flat knot. "Sayuri-san," he says, "On my life, I don't know any more than you do. She has no okiya. No one sponsored her as a maiko. She didn't attend any of the schools."
Sayuri remembers that distinctive knot, the placement of her hands, the angle of her head. "She is one of us," Sayuri says.
Mr. Sato hesitates. "A geisha is... made, not born," he says, and bows.
"She will be a geisha," Sayuri says. She wonders if Mameha had said the same thing about her. But Sayuri had been young when Mameha became her big sister, older than she should have been, but still young. Obedient and willing. This woman must be at least twenty. Although she has sponsored other geisha, Sayuri has never been anyone's big sister. She has never had the opportunity - or, perhaps, it is more accurate to say that she has slipped away from opportunity, avoided it, had other engagements, perhaps, she would say, next year... And now she is old. For years, she has only attended the most prestigious bookings, preferring instead to meet quietly with artists and musicians. And in New York, there are few instructors, no dance schools, no kimono makers, no messengers or maids. Geisha come to New York as professionals, not apprentices, and here there is nothing of the architecture of the arts that supports the hanamachi in Gion. Yet, if this woman is, as Sayuri believes, Mameha's daughter, named for her, carrying Mameha's lineage, building on Mameha's tradition, how much does she truly have to learn?
Sayuri remembers the perfect placement of Mameryo's toes on the tatami mat, in the cafe, and the surprise that showed so clearly on her face. She wonders if Nobu-san, too, had worried about taking on an apprentice who had not been raised in the traditions of the past, and consoled himself with the knowledge of his parentage. Sayuri was what she was, but the Chairman, if the Chairman had had a son, would never have raised him unaware of his heritage, and Nobu-san would have known this. Nobu-san, Sayuri thinks, likes to think of himself as a man who stands alone, and yet he is as embedded in structure and ceremony as she, and he, too, believes in destiny.
Her almanac had told her that travel was auspicious. Sayuri, dressed, thanks Mr. Sato, and calls her driver. Tonight she will look at her teahouse anew, because if she is to take on an apprentice, the setting of that apprenticeship must be perfect.
"Sayuri," Nobu had said, "I don't know when we will see each other again or what the world will be like when we do, but I will think of you every time I need to remember there is beauty and goodness in the world."
Did he still? What does he think, Nobu-san, when he looks at her son? Do the cherry trees still blossom in Maruyama Park? Is the moss as green in the gardens of Gion, and the water as sweet? Does the sound of women laughing still echo through the evening, under the lanterns of the narrow streets? Are there still chestnut-sellers outside the Minamiza Theater, every winter?
For the first time, Sayuri looks at the spacious beauty of her teahouse as if she was a guest and not its mistress, as if destiny is already sweeping her onward. In America, buildings are bigger, voices louder, gestures more emphatic. There is a brightness about the rooms that is nothing to do with the golden straw of the tatami mats, so that the geisha seem painted in the bright enamels and chrome of the modern world, instead of the subtle shades of candlelit Gion. Everything is as it should be, as she has made it, to reflect this new world and provide a home, too, for the old, yet a camellia does not flower in isolation. The floating world is a garden, not a vase. If, even at her age, she takes on an apprentice, she must do so in a place that will offer the whole of the floating world, and not this single perspective.
Did her own okiya Mother think about the hanamachi as part of an apprenticeship, or assume that the architecture supporting the world of the geisha was immutable? Businesswoman that she was, if she had known setting had a cost, Mrs Nitta would have already calculated the debt of a lifetime. And yet, the time Mameha invested in Sayuri was worth a fortune, far more than Mameha gained from the bet she won; the Chairman had made sure Sayuri never saw the accounts for her kimono or the jewels she wore in her hair; she herself had been indulgent with affection. If she was indeed to take on an apprentice, here at the very end of her life when she had thought herself close to retired, then surely she owed it to herself to offer the best of herself and the world she inhabited?
If a tree has no roots, can it still consider itself a tree...?
In the morning, when the maid opens the blinds, the day shows itself to be one of those fresh, sharp mornings that made the city beautiful, all its metal and glass gleaming and its small joys magnified - the creeping lichen on stone steps, the pattern of ironwork railings, the shape of pots stacked in a front yard. Sayuri, waking into it, remembers days when she and the Chairman had made time to travel together, and feels once again the aching loss of absence. She has made a life for herself, but that life had been shaped around someone else; like wisteria, she had taken her form from the supporting pine, blooming only because of its strength. When the pine is gone, the wisteria still blossoms, but it is hollow at its heart.
Was she so lacking in resources? Would not the Chairman himself expect more of her? When she was a girl, she had been like a leaf in the stream, carried along by the current, blown by the winds. Was it destiny, or her own striving, which had brought her to the Chairman and the life she had created for herself? Was she now content to be that leaf again, swept into the dark? Her almanac says, good decisions will bring balance to her life - but what is the good decision?
The Chairman would have accepted her choice, but in that moment, Sayuri remembers Nobu-san saying to her, life is a stream, but if you bump, and tussle, and fight, and seize every opportunity - I shall seize this opportunity, Sayuri says to herself. Today, I shall seize this opportunity.
And so in a small cafe in New York, the geisha Sayuri smiles, and set her tea bowl down on the table, and says, Mameryo-san, if, for example, this old geisha might make an offer to you...
Transition
When the geisha Sayuri comes home to Gion, she brings with her three things; a key, a scroll, and a small box. Her driver, picking her up from the airport, has to disguise his bemusement that she has no more luggage than one single bag, and then he comes dangerously close to betraying surprise when, as he holds the door of the limousine for her, one of the newspaper photographers who frequent the airport foyer glances over, and spins on his heel, camera raised. "Madame Nitta!" he calls. "Madame Nitta, is that you?"
Disturbed by the raised voice, other people turn to stare. The driver, professionally stone-faced, is startled. He is not here to pick up a celebrity, an actress or a sports star, or the head of a corporation. He is here to pick up an elderly woman, modestly dressed, elegant as many older women, he thinks, are elegant, her hair perfectly styled despite the overnight flight, her kimono fresh and uncreased, her face showing the bones of the beauty she must have had as a young woman. Classical beauty demands an oval face, but Madame's is broad, sharp around the chin and eyebrows, although her eyes have the perfect almond shape of the women pictured in the antique scrolls of the Tokyo National Museum. Or of the geisha in the poster on the wall of his daughter's bedroom - and so, between one step and the next, the driver hesitates. He has seen his passenger's face before. He has seen it in his daughter's scrapbook, in blog posts and on calendars, as his daughter enthuses about the geisha who lived and worked in Gion.
He knows this woman, although he never expected to be honored by her company. It is like - he feels a little light headed: he thinks, this is as close as he will come to being a servant at the Imperial Court, he thinks he should have asked his wife to iron his socks this morning, he hopes his bow was deep enough and the geisha Sayuri, the geisha who gave up everything for love, he hopes that she does not find him impolite. He wonders how he might possibly address the issue of a calling card or a photograph for his daughter: he has never driven so smoothly or been so conscious of the passenger who sits behind him, a woman as self-contained as an antique vase, one of the plain ones, with the color of the glaze so deep that a man might stare into it for hours.
He clears his throat. "Honorable Madame," he says, carefully, "Madame, where might I take you?"
"Gion," says the geisha Sayuri. "To the Tominaga-Cho, please."
Sayuri is going home.
It is not that Sayuri has forgotten what it is like to pass through life alone and unsupported. Her sister Satsu haunts her still, the dark shadow to her own brightly petaled life. But there is no doubt that she has become accustomed to the support of powerful men and punctilious women. Her teahouse is immaculately managed. Her accountant manages her finances, her maids care for her house and her wardrobe, her lawyer keeps a careful eye on her properties and her image. Her travel is managed by a concierge and her appointments are carefully curated. It was the care and concern of the Chairman, a powerful and intelligent man, to anticipate and provide for every eventuality, including his own death, so that all the arrangements which supported Sayuri while she was the Chairman's companion support her now, when she is not. So, it is to the Chairman's company she turns after she drinks sake with the new Mameryo, sealing their contract.
"Please," writes Sayuri, to the accountants at the Iwamura Electric company who have been so very kind to her over the long years she has lived in New York. "Would it be possible for the honorable gentlemen to find a house, in Gion? A small house," Sayuri writes, thinking of the tiny courtyard and smaller rooms of the okiya where she grew up, which nevertheless housed geisha and maiko and maids, Mother and Grandmother and Auntie. "Near the theater." She thinks again of the river, and the cherry blossoms; she hopes that there might be such a house for herself and Mameryo, of polished wood and smooth floors, with space for her kimono, with an alcove for her scrolls and a shelf for her quilts.
She has only had time to listen to Mameryo play shamisen, with skill and feeling, and discuss with her the seasonal dances two geisha may perform, when the parcel arrives. It is small, but heavy. It contains the key to a house, in Gion, and a letter, and a box. The letter, on headed notepaper, tells her that she has a house. It has been shuttered for many years, but the company has maintained it, and has sent workmen and cleaners and gardeners, so that all should be as the Chairman envisaged when she arrives. The letter is a letter rich with honorifics and the conventions of conversation, and it is signed by an accountant Sayuri first encountered as a new recruit, star-struck and stammering, who is now the head of his department.
The box, wrapped in hand-printed silk, contains a statue. It's a statue of black rock with a crack in the middle: caught in the crack, as if washed there by the current, is a sprig of plum blossoms. The flowers are softened, caught just at the point when their fresh beauty begins to age, so that the bright colors of their first bloom have faded, just as the lively kimonos of the young geisha are laid aside by the older. Yet the sprig of blossoms is softly beautiful with its ripe, open flowers, and echoes the curve in the rock, so that together the two form a harmonious whole, as if that particular sprig was intended to fall just so into that particular crack in the rock.
The rock is, of course, concrete.
If a man expresses interest in a particular geisha, it is expected that that man's business partners refrain from pursuing the same geisha. Should a man be lucky enough to become that geisha's danna, her sponsor, then his business partners may well benefit from the arrangement, for the danna has the right to request the geisha's company, no matter how well known and in demand she might be, but a business partner may never pursue a more intimate relationship with the geisha herself. Even if the relationship between the danna and the geisha ends, an honorable business partner refrains from intimacy with the geisha.
For years, Nobu Toshikazu made it clear that he was interested in becoming Sayuri's danna. He was a forceful man, who understood the intricate rules and traditions of business and of the flower and willow world and used both to his advantage, a man who moved through a world where perfection was everything who was, himself, inescapably imperfect. It was only by understanding the rules so completely, Sayuri came to believe, that Nobu-san could move outside them: his visible scars defied convention, so that in every other move he made Nobu-san could afford to challenge orthodoxy. It was Nobu-san's idea to finance the Iwamura Electric company from outside investors, a idea the Chairman resisted for months, and then embraced. Their new company became one of the most successful of the pre-war years. It was Nobu-san and the Chairman together who fought to rebuild their company after the war. They had nothing: like so many others, they could have disappeared into obscurity, or taken the honorable exit, as so many did, of suicide. To Nobu-san, it was more honorable to rebuild, and it was he who found a way to persuade the occupying Americans to reclassify, and then to invest in, the resurgent Iwamura Electric. If the Chairman was the heart of the company, then Nobu-san was its sword.
Just so had Nobu-san cut through the flower and willow world. He knew only too well how the geisha, for whom beauty was art and art beauty, regarded his scarred face and missing arm, the result of the burns he had endured when trying to protect a senior officer in an ambush in Korea. "I don't like geisha," he had said, and he had cause. His nickname in the hanamachi was Lizard Man. But Nobu-san had known how to move through the world of the geisha, how to manipulate it for his own purposes, how to create opportunities and pursue them, and he had brought that knowledge to his pursuit of Sayuri. He brought, too, kindness. "I have not brought you enough jewels," he said, but there had been plenty. "I have not taken care of you," he said, but Nobu-san had saved Sayuri's life during the war. "Our destinies lie together," he had said to her. Then he said, "Come back." He said, come back to Gion; become a geisha again, but he meant, come back to me.
As she grew older, Sayuri had come to realize that Nobu-san had indeed been different from every other man in the upside-down world of the geisha, ruled as it was by tradition and superstition. He had always treated her as if she were in charge of her own destiny, as if she had the same agency as he; it was in his defiance that she could root her own.
It was not Nobu-san's fault that Sayuri loved another man, nor that the other man was his own best friend and business partner. It was, perhaps, his fault that she found the strength to defy tradition and fight for that love with every weapon she had. Fulling all her hopes and dreams, the Chairman had become Sayuri's danna. She would be forever grateful. Nobu-san, she thought, would neither forget nor forgive.
Yet - one touch might lay waste to a house built on sand, but between them the Chairman and Nobu-san had created a friendship that withstood wars. Scandalously young, Sayuri retired, so that she might never come between her Chairman and his best friend. Later, she would move continents. The Chairman would never mention her name in public: Nobu-san would never allude to his best friend's private life. Destiny, which might have torn them apart, embraced them both once again, two of the most powerful men in Japan and two of the most industrious, for even in the world of the arts, their focus remained on their life's work, their company.
Except that, sometimes, Nobu-san might cancel his meetings, and the Chairman might lock his office. For a few days, every summer, Nobu-san might be found sitting as common people do, in the stands, watching sumo, with a small boy at his side and his best friend asleep in the next seat, or the Chairman fishing, miles from Kyoto, teaching that same boy to cast his fishing line while his best friend laughed at him. If, for example, the Chairman had a son, such a relationship may have happened. If, for example, that son grew older, so that Nobu-san began to introduce him to tutors as well as sumo wrestlers, and the Chairman began to value that son's polite, diffident comments as well as indulge them, it may have been possible that an observer come to a different conclusion, that what was friendship had become something deeper and more complex still. And when - when the Chairman left, then what could be more natural that Nobu-san should, without blinking, become the support on which that son could lean, and from which he could grow?
Sayuri had come to believe, over the years, that Nobu-san had grown to love her son for himself. Their relationship was not hers to influence: for good or ill, she would not step between the Chairman and his best friend again. But, sometimes, she would lie by the Chairman's side, and wonder if Nobu-san was still as acerbic as he had been in his younger days, if he looked at her son and traced the shape of her eyes in his face, if there was some long game of revenge Nobu-san was playing, or if could truthfully set aside his betrayal so easily. Did he remember her at all? Some people claimed one glance from her exceptional blue-gray eyes was unforgettable, but in her heart, Sayuri knew that she was just one among many geisha, although, surely, the luckiest and most fortunate of them all.
Now she knows. Now, she holds in her hands, exquisite and unforgettable, the first gift Nobu-san has sent her in decades. For a man who disdained subtlety, he has always understand the unspoken.
Come home, Nobu-san says to her, as clearly as if he stands by her shoulder. I have not forgotten you.
Sayuri picks up the key.
Gion
The house in Gion is exquisite. It could have built for her. In fact, as Sayuri moves through it, she feels the warm regard of the Chairman in every detail, for his taste, so exacting that every detail is unobtrusively perfect, is evident with every step she takes. In the modest porch with its overhanging roof of antique tiles, and in the rooms with their panels of rare wood and handmade paper. In the smooth slide of the doors, in the dove-tailing of the cupboards, in the bright gold of the fresh tatami mats with their embroidered silk edges and scent of new-mown hay. There is a space in one room where the whisper of her footstep is amplified as simply as if she were on stage, so that a performer's every note would heard and enjoyed: in an upstairs room there is a dressing table, with the arrangement of electric lights just as she has come to prefer them. There is space for her kimono, and for her shamisen, and for her wigs and sandals and bags and fans, her jewelry, her account books - although she has seldom read them - and her almanacs and diaries. There is space, too, plenty of space, for guests, for her maids, and for a student. There is an alcove, into which she might place a small and exquisite sculpture, of plum blossoms swept onto a rock. Hidden under the floors and in the cupboards, she finds all the conveniences of American modernity, rebuilt for Japanese aesthetics; underfloor heating, a hot water boiler, three telephone lines, a television - the Chairman had found American television fascinating, with its game shows and insight into the lives of people he would never meet.
In this house, which she will never share with the Chairman, Sayuri allows herself a moment of sentimentality over the neat pattern of electric wires, carefully braided. In this she could see the hand of the man she loved, the man who had been an engineer before he was a businessman, and who had brought all of himself to a house he will never know she loves.
Then she dries her eyes, slides open the door, and stands looking at the garden. Like the house, it is small, and made smaller by the bath in the corner with its stool and wash basin, but the stone flags are freshly scrubbed where they are meant to be walked on and deeply mossed where they are not. The pond is bronze-dark, edged with the tall leaves of iris and bulrushes, crossed by stepping stones laid out with such harmony that they might have sung, although in this garden the walls are so high that even the sound of the Kyoto traffic has faded, and there is no sound but peace. Even the faint gulp of a koi carp rising to the surface is muted, as if the fish, too, have learned the arts of contemplation.
There are few things Sayuri denied her son, but it is not possible, in an apartment building in New York, to build a pond for fish.
In August, during O-bon, Japanese families welcome the spirits of their ancestor back into the family home. There is a welcoming fire, and feasting, and discussion of all the events and celebrations which have taken place over the last year, the marriages, births, and deaths, the family gossip, the small triumphs and bitter griefs. It's a bittersweet festival for the women of the floating world, for many of them have been adopted into the family of an okiya, leaving behind beloved parents, a little brother, or a elder sister, forgetting their own ancestors. For the Japanese people as a whole, after the war, so many families were bereft that the festival of Toro Nagashi was created to honor the dead. Now, at the end of O-bon, to help their ancestors find their way back to the spirit world, Japanese families light paper lanterns and send them downstream, clouds of candlelight illuminating the rivers and streams, floating towards eternity....
In a house in Gion, Sayuri, in this moment, feels as light as a paper lantern, floating downstream, guided by love. She thinks, how fortunate I have been. She thinks, it is time for me to pass on what I have learned. In this house, I shall teach. She thinks, hurrying to the door with the small steps of a woman who wears kimono every day, where is the maid?
There is a shadow behind the door. She slides it open.
Nobu-san's black frown is as angry as the clap of a thunder cloud. He is already straightening up from a bow which must have been perfunctory at best and insulting at worst. "What took you so long?"
Somewhere between the hot water tank and the fishpond, Sayuri has lost her professional mask. She can feel her eyes widen. Her nerves sing, as if the fresh air has stripped away the paint and left her skin exposed, although it's been years since she wore the full-face white make-up of a young geisha and decades since she'd let her emotions rule her face.
"Three years!" Nobu-san shouts. "Three years! I had begun to think you would never come. Build a house, he said! We built a house!" His eyebrows are curled so low over his eyes he looks like an angry bull, the lines on his forehead shaping around the curves of his scars, the force of his anger powering his words. "Were you going to stay in New York forever? This is your home!"
"Nobu-san," Sayuri manages. She puts out one hand, and the wood paneling of her house feels warm and solid. "Nobu-san, it's been-"
"Decades! I know!" says Nobu-san. He stares at her, as directly as if she were a real person, not the simulacrum she has been for three years. He'd always looked under the paint. "You've got old, Sayuri," he says.
Sayuri laughs. She holds on tight to her house, and laughs, the shape of it curling up through her chest and into her cheeks, wide and astonished. It's fine for Nobu-san to say she looks old, she thinks, but he can't really talk, every hair on his head is silver, his wrinkles have wrinkles, his face as scarred by age as it was by that long-ago explosion. He looks an inch or two shorter, though although he's still got the sense of vigor that always made Nobu-san exceptional. And how dare he! It's been decades! What did he expect!
"What did you expect!" she says. "I'm not a young girl any more, and neither are you!"
Nobu-san actually stops. He's got one foot in the air, stomping up her steps, and he stops, and glares at her. "I was never a young girl!" he says. "Not like you with your almanac, and your lucky days, and your oh, Nobu-san, I'm so sorry, I can't come to the shrine today because it's unlucky to walk to the east!"
"And today was supposed to be lucky!" Sayuri says.
"Huh," Nobu-san says. He puts his foot back down, and nods. "Well," he says. "I can't argue with that. Aren't you going to invite me in?"
"You're going to come in anyway," Sayuri says. "I don't know why I missed you, Nobu-san, I have never met such an infuriating man!"
It's only then that Sayuri realizes Nobu-san has not come alone. As he kicks off his shoes, she looks past him, and sees, bowing, a couple of assistants with stacks of wrapped boxes, a woman in an apron, and a man she recognizes from his photograph, who is now silver-haired, although she remembers him when he was a new recruit with the ink still wet on his diploma. There is a delivery boy in uniform getting off his bicycle, and a postman, too, which suggests that even this group of people may not be all her unexpected guests.
"Nobu-san," she says.
Nobu-san looks up. His eyes are sharp and direct. She'd forgotten how forthright he was, and how few obstacles there were that would stop Nobu-san in his tracks. "Sayuri, you can't stay in an empty house," he says. "Some of these things have been in storage since you left. And I can't wait until you open your appointment book to introduce you - I'm a busy man!"
"Open my appointment book?" Sayuri repeats. "Nobu-san, I have been here less than a day!"
"So you are going back to work!" Nobu-san says. "Good. Gion has not been the same since you left. I don't like geisha anyway, but some of these younger ones look as if they have never held a cup of sake before, let alone learned to play us all like fish in a pond. It's time you showed them what a geisha can be."
"I'm sure there are wonderful geisha in Gion," Sayuri says, "Nobu-san, I don't know how you can be so rude."
"I'm not being rude," Nobu-san says, "Just truthful. You said yourself you'd been here less than a day! Wait until you've had time to look around, you'll see what I mean. I'd invite you to meet people," he says, grave-faced, "But most teahouses these days require a first-timer to be introduced, and I'm not sure I want to be responsible for you. Haring off to New York! Not a single letter!"
"How could I stay!" Sayuri exclaims. "Nobu-san, really!"
"Well, it's all water under the bridge now," Nobu-san mutters. He looks at the entrance, where there are no sandals for guests, and glances down at his socks. He doesn't say a word, but one of the assistants, managing to bow despite the weight of boxes in his arms, hustles past, and in a moment the crack of flint on steel suggests that a stove is being lit. Seconds later, sandals appear on the step, lacquered in black and gold, with an embossed leather strap. The other assistant bows so deeply Sayuri might have been an emperor's concubine, and minutes later there's the sound of doors opening and the rustle of fabric.
Nobu-san sighs, steps up, and puts on the sandals. He tucks his hands into the sleeves of his kimono, and looks at Sayuri. "Don't think I won't interfere," he says. "I'm a jealous man, Sayuri, and you know it. I know you think you can manage your own affairs, but it's no good - you weren't meant to hide yourself away. Now you're back-" He must have seen her face. He hesitates, and bows, stiffly. "I promised to take care of you," he says. "I promised - I'm not a man who -Sayuri, you know me, but - when he - and I-"
Behind Sayuri, the footsteps hurry upstairs. Water bubbles, boiling. She'd never have invited Nobu-san into an okiya when she was younger, when tradition demanded that no men were allowed through the front door and she was a working woman, but this is her own house.
"Nobu-san," she says. "Please, would you grace this humble person's home?"
Nobu-san hesitates. Then, he bows, deeply, as he should. "I'm honored," he says.
Waiting for them, inside, are warmed towels and hot water, the most beautiful and simple of tea sets, a box of cakes from the most exclusive of bakeries. The screens are open, so that in the courtyard the afternoon light splinters through the branches of the maple tree and dapples the pond. There's a small statute of a frog on the edge of it - it's the kind of statute a child would choose, endearingly sweet.
As if escaping emotion, Nobu-san heads straight to the open cupboard and pokes at the electric wiring. A moment later, he's switching lights on and off at a panel Sayuri hadn't realized existed. A spotlight in the alcove blooms with a warm, pale color that could almost be daylight. There seem to be hidden panels in the garden. A speaker crackles once, and Nobu-san clicks his tongue. "I can fix that," he says.
Kneeling, Sayuri watches him strip and twist wires, his scarred hand nimble and unhesitating, his face absorbed. He's so skillful - he must have learned to brace against the wall and use his teeth, too, where other people would use two hands. It's impressive. She's never seen Nobu-san at work before, much less on the kind of practical electronics for which Iwamura Electrics was originally created. When she had met the Chairman, he had already become a successful man, moving sure-footed through a world of influence and ceremony. Every motion he made was precisely calculated. It would have been hard to see the young apprentice in his cultivated elegance. But Nobu-san looks like a boy, frowning over connections, smiling in triumph when he flicks the switch and the speakers come alive as smoothly as they had been designed to do. "See!" he says. "I might be an old man, but I can still wire a switch."
"Oh, Nobu-san, you're not old!" Sayuri says. "How can you say such a thing?"
Nobu-san laughs at her. "Now you're feeling more yourself," he says, and comes to kneel on the mat. "Have one of these cakes. I'm told they're excellent. The old shop had to close, you know, but Akame's daughter opened up a stall behind the school, and some people say they're even better than the original."
"I'm sure they're very good," Sayuri says.
"I know these things are important," Nobu-san says. "What else? Oh, it's impossible to get a normal kimono any more - nothing without gold embroidery and an artisan's seal! If you just want something to wear around the house, you might as well try and make one yourself. But you'll need new kimono, of course. All your accounts have been checked, everything's up to date, no need to worry - we've brought the books just in case, but you don't need to concern yourself. Just let us know if you want to invest - people say the old Chion house might be for sale, if the right person asks..."
"I'm not opening an ochaya!" Sayuri says.
"Okay," Nobu-san says, "I suppose that's wise, you'll need all your time for this new apprentice. Still, if you change your mind..."
"Nobu-san," Sayuri says.
"And don't forget your old friends!" Nobu-san says. "I know for a fact the Foreign Minister was asking about you the other day."
"I'm honored," Sayuri says, automatically, and then she bows. "Nobu-san, I didn't expect such kindness from you. I'm truly grateful." It's true. Nobu-san could have made life in Gion impossible for her, if he choose. It's astonishing that he is behaving as if it is she, and not he, who has to be flattered and tempted into staying, as if she's as valuable to him as he was to her. In his own way, awkwardly and without tact, Nobu-san is mirroring the way he has experienced the world of the geisha as a customer, when everything depends on connections and favors, unspoken costs and shared understandings.
Nobu-san was always a kind man. She'd forgotten.
"If - if things had been different," Sayuri says awkwardly, "If-"
"If I had known he loved you," Nobu-san says, "I would never have spoken a word." He glares at her, and tosses back his tea as if it's a bowl of sake in a drinking game. "And now he has left us both. Do you think I would do anything less for you than I would do for him? The Chairman might have taught your son how to pick his sake, but who do you think taught him how to drink it?" Nobu-san sets his bowl down, so that the pottery chimes against the hard lacquer of the tray. "Don't ask me to walk away from you," he says. "Destiny brought us together, Sayuri, and it's not done with us yet."
Sayuri bows. There's a lump in her throat, and she doesn't think she can speak.
"Don't think I won't benefit," Nobu-san says. "I expect to book the very first appointment with the most famous geisha in Gion. And her apprentice! Imagine what clout I will have. Everyone will wonder why the beautiful Sayuri bothers to spend a minute in my company. People will be clamoring to meet me, just to ask if you are everything they say you are. They ask me already, you know. Everyone has forgotten all those old rumors, there's no need to be embarrassed. Look at me! I'm so old everyone's forgotten how ugly I was thirty years ago."
Sayuri bows again, unbearably grateful. "I haven't yet registered," she says. "I don't have an appointment book. But when I do, I promise, Nobu-san, yours will be the first name in it." Then she smiles, the slight and mischievous smile of a teasing geisha, and drops her eyes. "Of course," she says, "Only when my almanac says the time is right. It wouldn't do to be unlucky! Only the most auspicious day for you!"
"Fine," Nobu-san says. "But don't forget - I expect you to fly like a dragon, Sayuri. I know you can."
Nobu-san stands up. Behind him, his assistants clear away the boxes and packages, the bags and ribbons and tissue paper of the very best shops. The accountant bows to her as he leaves the books open for her to inspect if she chooses, the maid has left the wood as gleaming as if it's been lacquered, and there is a stack of bamboo steamers set on a samovar which suggests someone has brought her food. As if she moves under the shade of a willow, its branches brushing over her, Sayuri can feel the Chairman's attentive care as surely as if he was still alive, and at the same time she's aware of Nobu-san's sharper edged regard. He expects more of her. He always has.
"Perhaps you should be careful, Nobu-san," Sayuri says, "In case the dragon breathes fire."
She spreads her wings in the hanamachi. It would have been foolish to expect life in the world of the geisha to have gone on unchanged, and it has not, for since Sayuri left life in Japan, which the geisha mirror, has changed as well. It seems to her that the two things have come to reflect each other even more than they did when she was a young apprentice; Japan has become an international economy, opening up to investment and enterprise, while the world of the geisha has become so much smaller. There are four kimono shops left in Kyoto, two shamisen makers, a few craftsmen. Classes at the school enroll a handful of pupils, and those pupils are as likely to study privately as they are to be part of an okiya. Geisha customers have changed, too, for older men are accustomed to the language of the flower and willow world, but for younger men it's a novelty, so they need to be guided and taught. It's as if they're paying to view a performance, not to be part of one. They don't have the crass joviality of the American soldiers, but it's wearing, Sayuri learns, to know that every song will need to be repeated and every game explained.
"No one quotes poetry to me anymore," one of the older geisha laments to her, over tea.
It seems to Sayuri that as the two worlds moved further away from each other, the women of the floating world clung on to its past with an iron grip. Traditions which used to be flexible have become set in stone, fashions have become requirements, and performances codified. When there were thousands of geisha, new styles would sweep through the community, so that one year everyone was tying their obi with one particular knot, and next year a different arrangement of folds was all the rage. Now every rank of geisha has a specified style. Kimono used to reflect seasonality, and now they are tied to the season. There are specified songs and limited performances, a universal billing system, bookings made by agents. Geisha are a national treasure which Japan never mentions: other countries send their best diplomats, to be entertained in secret.
It's a change in focus from New York, where everything was in the open. No American hid his visit to a teahouse - Sayuri has lost count of the number of marketing executives who left their cards and wanted her to advertise with them. In New York, too, everything moved fast: fashions came and went, conversation moved swiftly, and geisha sung songs written by westerners and made jokes about television programs. In New York, men expected her to speak up, to interrupt, to be heard, to move swiftly: she had thought she had retained her Japanese sensibility, but it's hard to readjust her thinking to the old formality of the hanamachi. Sometimes, it's too much. She's too old. Life moves to fast, she's a leaf on the river, swept away.
But then there is Mameryo. Sayuri's apprentice seems to have an understanding of the modern world that Sayuri does not have: she can move so easily between the two, as at home in a suit as she is in a kimono. She cherishes the tape-player in her room and collects bootlegs of concerts performed by musicians who play electric guitars and dress like beggars, but she hums folk songs in the bath and knows almost as many Kouta, the short songs of the geisha musicians, as Sayuri does. When Sayuri takes gifts and cards around to the craftsmen and craftswomen of the hanagatchi, none of them flick their eyes to the respectful Mameryo as if they recognize her, but when it comes to discussing the pattern of a new kimono or the placement of embroidery on an obi, Mameryo is as well informed about symbolism and tradition as a folklorist. She prefers Coca-cola, but her tea ceremony is exquisite: she knows the seasonal program of the geisha festivals as if she grew up with it, but if she has a couple of hours spare - and Sayuri is not the hardest of mistresses - she will be watching a film in one of the English-language cinemas. Sayuri's apprentice reads romances, recites limericks, and is learning to play golf.
"I'm not good enough for her!" she says one evening to Nobu-san. They've met, as they often do, to drink tea in the back room of the most discrete of the tea-houses. "How can I train her - I don't understand these new men!"
"What do you mean?" Nobu-san says. "They're men, aren't they? Just smile at them!"
"You think it's that simple," Sayuri says. "But, really, Nobu-san-"
For a week, he sends her groups of over-awed and tongue-tied youngsters, men who trip over their own socks and barely raise their eyes from the floor. They bow as if they have been told their salary depends on how much respect they show, they can't hold their sake, they giggle with endearing shyness. They could be her own son - she feels as if she's useful, as much an educator as an entertainer. One of them even comes back to ask Mameryo if she would mind talking to his sister, a student of classical music who would very much like to compare notes. Mameryo learns to deflect, but Sayuri begins to feels as if she has fourteen sons, not one.
"Enough!" she says.
"Oh," says Nobu-san, shirt sleeves rolled up, drinking tea. "I thought you'd enjoy yourself! I did. You should see how they look at me now!" He's amused. "What's next?" he asks.
"He is a kind man the way a sack of gravel lands on your foot," Sayuri says to Mameryo, but Nobu-san is a kind man, kind in the way few men are, as if she is a person with feelings, and not a painted doll.
"You know he never married," her son observes.
It is no business of his. Sayuri says nothing. They're meeting in the back room of the teahouse - she's not going to compromise her own son in public.
"You know, mama," her son says diffidently, "These days many people think being a geisha is an honorable profession."
He says, "It's hard to learn. People respect that."
He says, "Papa was proud of you."
She tried so hard. All these years, and no-one knows he's the son of a geisha. Except Nobu-san, of course, but Nobu-san has always been discreet when he needs to be.
"But of course she is Mameha's daughter," Nobu-san says to her, impatiently and indiscreetly, a week later, in the same teahouse. "Whose else would she be?"
"She never said!"
"And did you mention your son?" Nobu-san says. He toasts her, with a bowl of tea.
Sayuri can't imagine Mameha confiding in Nobu-san. He's not really that sort of man, although he reminds her these days of an aged pine tree on a cliff, strength in every root. He's as astringent as a handful of pine-needles, but pine-needles are strengthening. Consumed in moderation, a tea made of pine-needles is a restorative brew.
She confesses her nosiness to Mameryo, but her apprentice laughs at her. "How do you think I knew where to find you?" she asks. Sayuri would never have laughed, but Mameryo looks at her fondly. "Honored Mother," she says, and bows, formal as Mameryo seldom is when she's not wearing kimono. "I wanted to be ready for you."
She is. Sayuri's apprentice is skilled, and charming, and beautiful not just in the way many young women are beautiful, but with the elegant bones and oval face of her mother's classical beauty. She's observant, too, so that all those evenings she's spent watching Sayuri entertain have given her the professional mask of a geisha, to slide under her white paint. And she's confident - she's well traveled, well read, educated, used to meeting people on their own level. If anyone was made to be a geisha - the kind of geisha the Chairman expected, the kind Sayuri had to work for decades to become - it's Mameryo .
It's Sayuri who gets cold feet. She'd slipped quietly into Gion, wearing everyday kimono, carrying a shopping bag and her spectacles. She takes tea every morning in a little cafe where only the serving staff know her name; she has one maid, her dresser is almost retired, her hairdresser hasn't worked with geisha for years. In the shops of the hanamachi, old men bow to her, but she knows she'll never bring another young man to his knees. Can she really support Mameryo as she should?
"Why not book the theatre?" Nobu-san asks. "If anyone can pull off a full performance, Sayuri, it's you."
"A show!" Sayuri says. "I can't - Nobu-san, I have never done such a thing in my life!" It is the union which organises performances, not the geisha, although this year there were not enough geisha for the spring performance, and no procession for autumn: few musicians, no scenery, sparse crowds.
"What nonsense! It's time you went into the ring," Nobu-san says.
Sayuri lets herself think of it - what it would take to persuade and entangle and encourage, the complicated web of alliances and favours, the politics and power games of ochiya and geisha. She remembers the haunting beauty of pre-war performances, and the power of knowing she held an audience in the palm of her hand. Geisha created art for the elite, but theatre performances could reach anyone who had a ticket: the chairman of Iwamura Electric could rub shoulders with a rickshaw driver on the bench seats of the theatre. It was at the theatre that the stars of the geisha world achieved incandescence.
Such brightness did not come without cost. It was expensive for an ochiya to put one geisha on the stage. To sponsor a whole performance could be ruinous.
"If Iwamura Electric can sponsor a sumo match, I can't see why we can't sponsor a performance," Nobu-san says. "Spring flowers, right?" He slips out of his shoes. "We could televise it. A showcase. Not just for Iwamura, for Japan, too. I'll speak to the minister."
"Please, sit," Sayuri says, distracted. "Nobu-san-"
He has already rolled up his shirt sleeves and bent over the spirit lamp. "How do I do this?" he asks, "Whisk the tea with the brush, right? And warm the bowl?"
"Yes, but-"
"It's never too late for an old dog to learn new tricks," Nobu-san says. He braces a bowl against his thigh, whisking unevenly, just like a maiko on her first day.
Sayuri's almanac had offered her good fortune: her fortune teller had suggested she should embrace change, as she celebrated the seasons: at the shrine, she had selected a good luck paper fortune....
Nobu-san, bowing, offers her a bowl of tea.
"I'll need new costumes," Sayuri warns.
"Of course," Nobu-san says. "It'll be like the thirties again - I've always thought a wiring harness would make a good pattern."
"And scenery," Sayuri goes on.
"That artist you had for screens at the Chicago teahouse," Nobu-san says. "What was his name? Minello-san?"
"Yes, him," Sayuri says. "He's worked in theatre before." She takes an absent sip of tea - it's not bad, for a first attempt, and for a moment when she is contemplating chaos a chaotic tea service seems more than appropriate. She says, "Some retired geisha might-" and then, "-Nobu-san, you were in Chicago?"
"Why should I not be?" says Nobu-san, and laughs at her. "Don't look like that, it's not as if I made you an offer." He must see something in her face, because he reaches out with his hand and takes one of hers - his hand is warm, and strong. "If I sponsor a sumo wrestler, he wins matches or he does not. Simple! If I sponsor another geisha, what do I get for my money? Beauty? The fish in this pond are beautiful! I want you, Sayuri - I want you to be clever, and smile at me, and to make me laugh, and I want - I want - I am sick of wanting, I want to stop wanting, I want a place to be and you in it. Your music, your dance, your performances - I know this is your art. It's as much part of you as the company is part of me. He knew that. Do you think I don't? Why else should I offer to work with you? You saved us, once." He takes a sip of tea. "Perhaps you should make me an offer," Nobu-san says thoughtfully.
The stream hesitates. Sayuri, who has known what it is to live half a life, always hidden, never acknowledged, part of the hidden world, hesitates with it. It's one thing to work with Iwamura Electric. It's another to work with its president, the business partner of her danna. Openly, without shame.
Sometimes destiny offers an opportunity to be seized.
"Perhaps I should," Sayuri says.
When she stands on the stage at the end of the performance, as no geisha has done before, because no geishas has directed a performance before, Sayuri wears a formal black kimono. Even the crests are discrete, although the silk is cut from a bolt that is nearly a hundred years old. Her obi, though - her obi is embroidered in red and gold, the colors of good health, celebration, new starts: on it, koi become winged, transforming into dragons. The thunder of applause might be the clap of their wings: she is humbled by it, exhilarated, overwhelmingly grateful. It's not easy, to bring the art of the geisha into the light, keeping what should be shadowed a mystery, but Sayuri thinks she has managed to find that balance.
She has had help.
Once, long ago, the Chairman had openly acknowledged his best friend. Sayuri, bowing, turns to the box where the minister is sitting, and the head of the television company, where a young man in the most elegant of kimonos cannot hide his proud smile, and where Nobu-san has leaned back in his seat as if he were the most casual and uninvolved of guests.
The announcer says, "This performance could not have happened without the generous support of our honoured patrons. We are grateful to Nobu Toshikazu of Iwamura Electric..."
From where she kneels at the side of the stage, Sayuri sees Nobu-san tense. She can imagine his voice. 'What a fool! That money isn't from me.'
The young man behind him leans forward, and offers a cup of sake. Nobu-san hesitates, and then, he takes the cup, staring down at it - people in the theatre are, carefully, glancing up at the box, at the man who is sponsoring the geisha Sayuri, who has directed this performance.
He looks up, this defiant, unconventional man, who has kept faith with his best friend, even when keeping faith shattered his own expectations. He raises his cup, and smiles.
Sometimes, destiny, unexpected and precious, brings happiness. Sayuri, defying tradition, smiles back.