Hatsumomo–Bando Shojiro relationship

Hatsumomo and Bando Shojiro VI have a long-standing, conspicuous intimacy that turns into a public rupture at a party in Pontocho. Their connection is first presented through Shojiro’s admiration of Hatsumomo’s beauty and his practice of imitating her gestures onstage; it ends with her biting and striking him in front of an audience, an outburst that helps hasten her expulsion from the Nitta okiya. The relationship thus moves from celebrity admiration and familiar visits to humiliation, violence, and the loss of Hatsumomo’s place in the household.

A celebrated intimacy

For years Hatsumomo had been very close to Shojiro, a famous Kabuki actor known as an onna-gata, a performer of women’s roles. In a magazine interview, he called Hatsumomo the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and said he sometimes copied her gestures onstage to make himself more alluring. When Shojiro was in town, Hatsumomo visited him. His public praise made their association visible beyond the private familiarity of those visits, while his performance practice linked her mannerisms to his own stage persona.

The relationship is not described as an exclusive romance. Shojiro’s attention to women such as Hatsumomo coexists with the narrator’s disclosure that he was homosexual. He had made a running joke of his unreturned affection for the English actor Basil Rathbone, whom he had befriended after staging Kabuki in London. That context complicates the party’s flirtatious performance: Hatsumomo and Shojiro’s closeness is real, but the narrative does not define it as a conventional love affair.

The Pontocho party

The decisive confrontation begins when Sayuri learns that Shojiro will attend a party at a teahouse in Pontocho, across the river from Gion. Hatsumomo has already dressed and slipped out before Sayuri returns to the okiya. Sayuri goes to tell Mameha, but Mameha is away praying at the small temple where she has paid for three jizo statues honoring the children she aborted at the Baron’s request. After Mameha returns, Sayuri tells her what she has discovered, and the information sets the evening’s encounter in motion.

At the party, Mameha is persuaded to perform. After her short dance pieces, Shojiro asks her to sit beside him, pours her sake, and turns his back on Hatsumomo. Mameha then flirts with him deliberately, using a soft, heightened voice and a convincingly acted blush. Hatsumomo watches with visible displeasure as the attention that had once been associated with her shifts toward Mameha. Shojiro’s change of focus is not merely a private slight: it unfolds before the gathering, with the other guests watching and participating.

Shojiro turns the party’s entertainment into a demonstration of theatrical performance. He first shows how he moves in his own work, sashaying with a folding fan and a fluid wrist; then he imitates Basil Rathbone’s style by dipping Mameha as if in a passionate embrace and kissing her face. The guests cheer, but Hatsumomo does not join them. When she calls Shojiro a fool, he teases her about being jealous, and Mameha encourages him to show how the two of them make up by giving Hatsumomo the same kisses he had given her. Their familiar bond is made into a spectacle and tested in front of the very company that has just applauded Shojiro and Mameha.

Public rupture

Shojiro eventually takes Hatsumomo in his arms and bends her backward. She bites his lip—not enough to draw blood, but enough to shock him—and then slaps him, striking the side of his head rather than his face. The abrupt change from staged embrace to real violence breaks the party’s comic mood. In the sudden quiet, Shojiro cries out that she has bitten him, while Hatsumomo stands angry and breathing heavily. The physical response turns a teasing performance about jealousy into an unmistakable confrontation.

Mameha manages the immediate aftermath. She soothes Shojiro and signals the theater director to remove Hatsumomo. The director takes her downstairs and pushes her out onto the street. Hatsumomo does not return to the okiya that night; when she comes back the next day, she appears disheveled and is summoned to Mother’s room for a long meeting. A few days later, Mother expels her. The narrative does not present the party as the sole cause of that decision: Hatsumomo’s earnings had declined, food was scarce, and Mameha believed Mother had wanted to get rid of her for years. But the attack on Shojiro and the public disgrace leave her with little prospect of being welcomed by another okiya.

Aftermath and significance

The rupture changes the meaning of a relationship once marked by Shojiro’s praise and Hatsumomo’s regular visits. At the party, his attention moves to Mameha, and Hatsumomo’s attempt to reclaim intimacy ends in an act that damages both her standing and her future prospects. The scene’s performance motifs sharpen the reversal: Shojiro’s impersonation of different styles and Mameha’s simulated blush are deliberate acts, but Hatsumomo’s bite and slap escape the playful frame and expose anger that the audience can no longer mistake for acting.

Hatsumomo’s fate remains uncertain. Years after the war, Sayuri hears that she may have been making a living as a prostitute in Miyagawa-cho, but the report is unconfirmed; a man who went looking for her could not find her. The account offers no later meeting or reconciliation between her and Shojiro. Instead, their relationship remains fixed in the remembered party, where the once-celebrated intimacy ends in a public loss of control and precedes Hatsumomo’s disappearance from the okiya and from Sayuri’s known life.