Memoirs of a Geisha: Chapter 35 Summary & Analysis

In the present, Sayuri says that the day the Chairman kissed her marked the end of her grief and suffering. Every day since leaving Yoroido, her life had been a struggle against one obstacle or another, but after the ceremony that officially makes the Chairman her danna, Sayuri feels her life become easier, as if she were a tree who finally made its roots.

To make his relationship with Sayuri easier for Nobu to accept, the Chairman has Sayuri stop being a geisha. This way Nobu would not have to see her around Gion. The Chairman pays Mother a considerable amount of money each month so that Sayuri can end her career. Sayuri also learns that since the Chairman is married, she can’t move in with him. But he does buy her a house outside of Kyoto, where they spend most evenings together. During the day she finds things to occupy herself with, while at night they talk and enjoy each other’s company. Over the next few years, he often takes her to New York City on business trips.

They are happy together and time passes quickly until the summer of 1956. The Chairman had two daughters with his wife and, during that summer, he arranges for his eldest daughter to marry a man named Minoru Nishioka. Without any sons, the Chairman hopes his new son-in-law will inherit the electric company. At the last moment, however, the man changes his mind about the marriage, which distresses the Chairman. Though Nishioka didn’t give his reasons for calling off the marriage, Sayuri knows the real reason. Sayuri (in the present) says that if the Chairman’s geisha had given birth to a son, then the Chairman might change his mind and turn over the company to his illegitimate son instead of to Nishioka. Sayuri says that Nishioka might have heard rumors that Sayuri had given birth to a son, which might have made him rethink the marriage arrangement. Sayuri then says that she would rather not mention if she truly gave birth to a son, because it might hurt the boy’s reputation.

A week after Minoru Nishioka’s change of heart, Sayuri approaches the Chairman and suggests that she should relocate to New York and open up a traditional teahouse for the recent influx of Japanese businessmen and artists. Sayuri says that a child raised between two cultures often has a difficult time, so a mother who moves with her child to the United States would make it her permanent home and have no choice but “never bring her child back to Japan at all.” Realizing that Nishioka might agree again to the marriage if he learns that the Chairman’s illegitimate son will live in America, the Chairman agrees to let her set up a teahouse in New York.

In August of that year, Sayuri moves to New York and Nishioka agrees to marry the Chairman’s daughter. Before long, New York comes to feel as much a home to Sayuri as Gion did. Sayuri runs a successful teahouse where she meets and befriends Japanese artists and intellectuals. Sayuri sometimes thinks of returning to Gion for a visit, but fears that she would be disturbed by all the changes. She says that after Mother died, the okiya was torn down and replaced with a concrete apartment building. Eight hundred geisha had worked in Gion when Sayuri first arrived years ago, but now there were less than sixty.

One day, Sayuri and the Chairman walk through Central Park. Standing with two frail hands on his cane, the Chairman breathes in the air and says that the things he remembers are more real than the things he sees. When they arrive home that night, Sayuri says that they “drank each other up with so much yearning.”

That night, Sayuri dreams of being at a banquet back in Gion, talking with an elderly man who was explaining to her that his dead wife still lived on inside him. In the dream, Sayuri sips from an excellent tasting broth and thinks that she is drinking up all the people who left her in her life. She awakens with tears streaming down her face and grips the Chairman’s hand, fearing his death. But when he dies only a few months later, she understands that he left her “just as naturally as the leaves fall from the trees.” Sayuri says that by telling her life story as she has just done, she has relived her life in the richness of her memories.

Sayuri says that sometimes while in walking through New York City she is struck by the exoticness of her surroundings. But then she thinks that Yoroido would also seem exotic to her now. As a young girl, she believed her life would not have been a struggle if she had not left Yoroido. But now she knows that her struggles never really mattered in the scheme of things, because “our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean.” Sayuri ends her memoirs by saying that “whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.”