Chiyo and Satsu are sent to Kyoto

Chiyo and Satsu are sent to Kyoto after their father agrees to Mr. Tanaka’s proposal, but the sisters are not adopted into the life Chiyo has imagined. Taken from their home under the promise of a visit, they are delivered to a broker and transported by train; at their destination, Satsu is sent elsewhere while Chiyo is left at an okiya. The journey turns a child’s hope of rescue into separation and begins a system in which her acquisition, upkeep, and training become debts she must repay.

The proposal and Chiyo’s expectation

Chiyo’s departure begins with a conversation she overhears at home. Mr. Tanaka asks her father, Sakamoto, what he thinks of a proposal; Sakamoto hesitates, saying he cannot picture the girls living anywhere else. Mr. Tanaka replies that they would be better off, as would their father, and instructs him to have them come to the village the following afternoon. The conversation is serious, but Chiyo does not hear its terms. She has already begun fantasizing that Mr. Tanaka will adopt her, and the possibility gives her a source of comfort amid her family’s distress.

When Mr. Tanaka speaks directly to Chiyo, he invites her and Satsu to visit his home in Senzuru and meet his daughter, suggesting they might stay the night before he brings them back. His assurances fit Chiyo’s hope of adoption closely enough that she accepts the journey as a step toward a new family. The difference between what she expects and what the adults have arranged is the episode’s central reversal: she thinks she is being welcomed into a home, while the journey is carrying her away from her family.

The journey to Senzuru

At the Japan Coastal Seafood Company, Mr. Tanaka greets the sisters with unexpected coldness. He seats Mr. Sugi in front with him and tells the girls to ride in the back. He also calls Satsu by the wrong name, addressing her as Shizu; Chiyo registers the mistake as rude, although Satsu appears not to notice. They sit among empty fish baskets on slimy planks, a materially revealing contrast to the comfortable domestic welcome Chiyo has pictured. As the wagon travels, the sisters remain silent. When Satsu points out a train in the distance, Chiyo notices its smoke and imagines it as a snake shedding its skin, but she still expects to explain the image to Mr. Tanaka and his daughter when they reach the house.

The wagon does not turn toward Mr. Tanaka’s home. Instead, it stops beside the railway tracks outside Senzuru, where farmers and other travelers wait with sacks and crates. Mrs. Fidget stands there with a narrow man in a stiff kimono, carrying a cloth bag on a string. Mr. Tanaka introduces him as Mr. Bekku. He says nothing, studies Chiyo closely, and seems puzzled by Satsu. The unfamiliar setting and the silent broker make the sisters’ arrival look less like a family visit than a handover, though Chiyo is still too confused to understand the arrangement fully.

When the train approaches, Mr. Tanaka leads the sisters back to the platform. Mr. Bekku wedges himself between them and leads them by their elbows into the train car. Chiyo hears Mr. Tanaka call after them, but in her distress she cannot tell what he says: perhaps a promise that they will meet again, perhaps an order to wait. The uncertainty leaves their departure without a clear farewell. The man who brought them to the station is already receding into ambiguity, while the children are placed under the control of a stranger.

Arrival and separation

In Kyoto, the sisters’ surroundings sharpen Chiyo’s sense of disorientation. She sees the Minamiza Theater across a bridge and mistakes its grand tiled roof for a palace. In the narrow streets, elegant women in kimono hurry past; she later learns that most are maids. The city offers dazzling surfaces, but the crowded wooden houses also renew her feeling of being lost.

At the doorway where Mr. Bekku tells Chiyo to get out, Satsu tries to follow. He turns and pushes her back into the vehicle, telling her that she is going elsewhere. For a brief moment, the sisters understand each other’s feelings without words. Chiyo’s eyes fill with tears as Mr. Bekku pulls her backward; she is on the point of throwing herself into the street when Satsu sees something in the doorway behind her. The separation is not an agreed division or a temporary parting the girls can manage for themselves. It is imposed at the threshold, by the adult who controls their movement, and the sisters have only an instant to recognize what is happening.

After Chiyo is brought inside, she sees a woman strike flint against a stone behind Hatsumomo, sending sparks onto her back as a good-luck ritual before an evening out. Hatsumomo glides away, her tiny steps and fluttering kimono making Chiyo take her for a performer. Mr. Bekku then hands Chiyo to the older woman and leaves in the rickshaw with Satsu. Chiyo is still sobbing in the entryway when the woman helps her to her feet, dries her face with a handkerchief, and tells her to call her Auntie. That brief kindness does not undo the loss: Satsu has been carried away, and Chiyo has been left in the household that will become the setting of her apprenticeship.

Debt and the household economy

The meaning of the sisters’ removal becomes clearer when Chiyo later learns how the okiya’s finances work. When Hatsumomo’s trick involving a kimono adds to her costs, Chiyo asks how she will pay. She is told that, once she works as a geisha, she must repay the okiya not only for the kimono but for meals, lessons, and medical fees. The account books Mother keeps include the cost of acquiring her as well. Chiyo had wondered whether Mr. Tanaka made money by helping to sell the sisters, and how much they had cost, but she had never imagined that she herself would be required to repay the price.

The financing of Chiyo’s training later repeats this logic in a more explicit negotiation. Mother tells Mameha that Chiyo’s debts may keep growing and proposes paying her only half the usual share of Chiyo’s future earnings at first. In return, if Chiyo repays her debts by twenty, Mother will give Mameha the remainder of what she would ordinarily have earned, plus an additional thirty percent. The offer makes the household’s arrangement plain: training may create a path to professional earnings, but the cost of that path is bargained over by adults who expect to claim a portion of Chiyo’s future labor.

The later settlement after Chiyo’s mizuage confirms the long reach of the original transaction. Mother adopts her because the fee is more than enough to clear the debts, and, as the okiya’s daughter, Chiyo no longer owes them individually. But the okiya absorbs the debts in exchange for her profits, including the mizuage proceeds and her earnings afterward. Her name changes first to Sayuri and then, through adoption, to Nitta Sayuri. What began as a journey ostensibly toward a better home has become an institutional transfer: family separation opens into an apprenticeship whose care and expenses are inseparable from economic claims on the girl.

Significance of the transfer

The journey establishes a pattern in which Chiyo’s hopes are shaped by decisions made beyond her knowledge. Mr. Tanaka’s appeal to her father, the unannounced meeting with Mr. Bekku, the train ride, and the separation at the doorway form successive stages of a transfer that the child cannot interpret until afterward. The remembered uncertainty over Mr. Tanaka’s final words captures the loss of control particularly sharply: Chiyo cannot even be sure whether she heard a farewell or a command to wait.

The episode also introduces the household as both a place of shelter and a financial institution. Auntie’s handkerchief and gentle reassurance offer Chiyo immediate comfort, but the okiya will record her acquisition, meals, instruction, and medical treatment as costs. Later negotiations over Mameha’s share and Mother’s adoption show how those early costs are linked to future earnings. The separation therefore does more than move Chiyo from one place to another: it replaces the family life she expected with a system in which protection and training carry a debt, and in which belonging itself is bound to the household’s claim on her work.