“Hopes are like hair ornaments.”

“Hopes are like hair ornaments.” Mameha’s rebuke to Sayuri makes hope both precious and burdensome: a girl may want to adorn herself with too many imagined futures, while experience teaches her to regard even one as an embarrassment. The image gains force from the novel’s recurring hair ornaments, which are not abstractions but objects of expense, craft, memory, and exchange.

The Metaphor in Mameha’s Counsel

Sayuri raises the possibility that her hopes might one day come true, speaking through tears as she tries to hold her feelings in. Mameha answers that young girls hope for foolish things and compares those hopes to ornaments girls want to wear in excess. In old age, she says, even a single ornament would look silly. The image turns disappointment into a lesson about time: youthful expectation is not merely denied but recast as something one may later feel ashamed to have carried.

Mameha’s counsel also places Sayuri’s private longing against the constraints of her profession. She insists that geisha do not become geisha because the life will satisfy them, but because they have no other choice. The ornament metaphor therefore does not simply mock a girl’s romantic wishes; it measures the distance between the future she imagines and the restricted life she is being told to accept.

Ornaments as Material Objects

Elsewhere, the book gives hair ornaments the weight that makes the metaphor tangible. In the dressing of Hatsumomo, elaborate kimono are held smooth by a long obi, cords, clasps, and padding; the finished clothing represents extraordinary expense, potentially as much as a policeman or shopkeeper might earn in a year. Such detail establishes a world in which adornment is skilled labor and costly property, not merely decoration.

The same material world appears in the okiya’s storehouse. Its red-lacquered cases contain stacks of kimono, some so valuable that Granny fears a fire could destroy a collection worth more than the villages of Yoroido and Senzuru combined. The most expensive apprentice garments are kept in a rented vault once Hatsumomo can no longer wear them. Against this carefully guarded abundance, Mameha’s image of girls wanting too many ornaments suggests an appetite formed within a culture that makes beauty visible, valuable, and conditional on one’s place in the profession.

Gift, Memory, and Scarcity

A hair ornament also carries personal meaning when Nobu gives Sayuri an antique comb. After Sayuri’s own ornament falls into Nobu’s lap, he asks for the package he had brought and presents the comb in front of the others: a half-circle of showy red, decorated with bright flowers and set on satin inside a little wooden box. The Chairman watches it wistfully and responds with sadness to Nobu’s unexpected sentimentality. The object is at once an adornment and a gift whose emotional significance is exposed in a public room.

The wartime years sharpen the contrast between this ornamental world and deprivation. When Sayuri moves her belongings across the okiya, military restrictions have banned cosmetics and permanents as luxuries. She has only a few scrolls, inkstones, and bowls, stereoscopic photographs, and a sterling-silver viewer given to her by the Kabuki actor Onoe Yoegoro XVII. Even these modest possessions belong to a life in which lavish gifts have become rare.

During the war, Mother profits by buying and selling other people’s heirlooms. Kimono from Arashino’s collection pass through her hands when he needs cash, and he hopes she will preserve them until he can buy them back; she claims not to be able to find them. Objects of beauty and inheritance thus become vulnerable to scarcity and resale, while the hopes attached to their recovery remain uncertain.

Meaning Across the Novel

The phrase draws its meaning from this repeated movement between adornment and loss. Ornaments can signal professional status, serve as intimate gifts, or survive as treasured possessions; they can also be out of reach when poverty and war narrow what a person can keep or expect. Mameha’s warning compresses that larger pattern into an image of youthful excess and later disillusionment, without making Sayuri’s hopes disappear. The novel lets the metaphor remain both a rebuke and a measure of what her circumstances ask her to relinquish.