Sachiko’s abandoned plan to emigrate to America

Sachiko’s planned emigration with Mariko and Frank turns a promised departure for America into a test of trust and maternal responsibility. What begins as a journey she describes as settled—car to the port, then a ship—unravels when Frank disappears. Sachiko’s account of his earlier failure in Tokyo helps explain her eventual decision to reject a future dependent on him, though her later announcement of a move to Kobe and then America leaves the plan’s final status uncertain.

The promised departure

Sachiko tells Etsuko that the arrangements have at last been settled and that she and Mariko will leave for America within days. She speaks with confidence, and the practical details give the announcement the shape of an imminent move: Frank is to collect them in his car, and they expect to be aboard a ship by the end of the week. Sachiko also treats departure as a release from her present circumstances. When Etsuko asks whether she will continue helping Mrs. Fujiwara, Sachiko answers that there will be no need to work in a noodle shop once she is going to America.

The certainty of this plan rests heavily on Frank. Sachiko presents him as the person who will carry the journey into effect, while the destination promises a different life for her and Mariko. But the promised timetable also makes his absence decisive: a departure expected within days depends on a man who cannot be found.

Frank’s disappearance and the earlier failure

When Frank disappears, Sachiko initially refuses to treat this as the end of the arrangement. She tells Etsuko that he has not gone far and argues that, had he intended to leave her, he would have left a note. She also points to his earlier journey from Tokyo to Nagasaki, where he came to find her at her uncle’s house, as evidence that he means to take her to America. In her interpretation, the disappearance is a delay rather than a reversal, and she expects to find him in Nagasaki.

That confidence is complicated by what Sachiko later recounts about Tokyo. She says that Frank had disappeared there before, spending the money they had saved on drinking in three days. Much of the money was hers. To rebuild their funds, Sachiko worked as a maid in a hotel, scrubbing floors; she recalls that they had nearly saved enough for a ship before Frank drank the money away. His new disappearance, this time while drinking with a woman at a bar, repeats the earlier pattern closely enough to undermine the future she had described as settled.

The repetition changes the practical stakes of the plan. The problem is no longer simply whether Frank will return in time for the ship; Sachiko now asks whether Mariko’s future can safely depend on him at all. Her recollection supplies a history of labor, lost savings, and renewed betrayal behind the immediate disruption.

Choosing Mariko’s welfare

After Frank’s disappearance, Sachiko recasts the decision in terms of her responsibility as a mother. She says that Mariko’s welfare must come before everything else and considers writing to her uncle to explain where she is and what has happened. If he is willing, she may discuss returning to his house; if he is not helpful, she says she will find another course. The proposed return is conditional, but it marks a clear alternative to leaving with Frank.

Sachiko also argues that America might not offer the settled life she had promised. Mariko would be among foreigners and, if Frank became her father, would face another disturbance in her life. Sachiko presents this prospect as a reason it may be just as well that the departure has been interrupted. Her claim that Frank is afraid of the responsibility Mariko represents further hardens her refusal to entrust her daughter’s future to him. She says she will not accompany a foreign drunkard and insists that her decision is to do what is best for Mariko.

This resolution is not presented as uncomplicated certainty. Sachiko laughs off the idea that the latest failure could distress her, saying that she expected it because a similar episode had happened in Tokyo. Her composure sits beside the concrete cost of that earlier episode: her hotel work and the savings lost in three days. The plan is abandoned not because the journey has become unimaginable, but because its dependence on Frank has become difficult to defend as a choice made for Mariko.

Kobe, America, and an unresolved ending

Later, Sachiko tells Etsuko that she is leaving Nagasaki for Kobe and then America, adding that Frank has arranged everything. She says she had meant to say goodbye after finishing the packing and assures Etsuko that a loan will be returned by post. The announcement restores the itinerary that her earlier decision seemed to set aside, without explaining how the conflict with Frank or her intention to write to her uncle has been resolved. The account therefore leaves a tension between Sachiko’s explicit rejection of life with Frank and her renewed assertion that the journey will proceed with him.

The contrast matters because America functions in Sachiko’s plans both as a destination and as a promise of a changed life, while the means of reaching it remain precarious. Her earlier experience in Tokyo exposes the costs concealed by the promise: money lost, work repeated, and Mariko’s future placed in the hands of a man Sachiko distrusts. Etsuko’s later recollection of arriving in England provides a distinct counterpoint: she remembers fields and a house that seemed to match the England she had imagined. That remembered satisfaction belongs to Etsuko’s migration, not to Sachiko’s outcome; it sharpens the difference between a destination imagined from afar and the uncertain arrangements by which a family might reach it.