Nishioka Minoru withdraws from his engagement to the Chairman’s eldest daughter at the last moment, undoing a succession arrangement intended to make him the Chairman’s heir. The episode unsettles the Chairman more deeply than anything the narrator has seen before, and its significance reaches beyond a broken marriage: it exposes how uncertain the future of the family company remains when inheritance depends on a prospective son-in-law and the Chairman has no son of his own.

The succession arrangement

In the summer of 1956, the Chairman, who had two daughters but no son, arranged for his eldest daughter to marry Nishioka Minoru. The marriage was meant to secure more than a family alliance. The Chairman intended that Nishioka take the Iwamura family name and become his heir, linking the company’s future to the planned union.

That plan made the wedding a point of vulnerability. Nishioka had already agreed to become the Chairman’s heir, but his agreement could not guarantee that the arrangement would hold. At the last moment he changed his mind and told the Chairman he would not go through with the wedding. The intended transfer of the family name and succession therefore failed together: without the marriage, the Chairman’s chosen heir would not join the family on the terms he had envisioned.

The withdrawal and its immediate effect

The Chairman regarded Nishioka as temperamental but brilliant. After Nishioka withdrew, the Chairman was upset for a week or more and snapped at his servants and the narrator without provocation. The narrator emphasizes the unusual scale of this reaction: she had never seen him so disturbed by anything. The change in his manner makes the failed engagement legible not simply as a private disappointment but as a blow to a future he had taken seriously.

The scene’s aftermath carries that disturbance forward. About a week after Nishioka’s change of heart, the Chairman was still brooding and had not spoken since before dinner. He and the narrator were sitting outdoors on the veranda at Eishin-an, overlooking the moss garden, when she raised the possibility of leaving Japan. The interval between the withdrawal and this conversation shows the event’s continuing force: the Chairman’s silence becomes the immediate setting for a conversation about a different future for the narrator.

A possible explanation, not a confirmed one

The narrator does not claim to know why Nishioka withdrew. She places the decision beside a recent public scandal: the founder of one of Japan’s largest insurance companies had removed his son as president and given control of the company to a much younger man, his illegitimate son by a Tokyo geisha. The founder praised the younger man’s talents in the newspapers without disclosing their relationship, but the truth became widely known. The episode had made the possibility of an illegitimate son inheriting a family business newly visible and contentious.

Against that background, the narrator imagines that Nishioka may have feared the Chairman would someday redirect his succession plans. The Chairman was known to lament having no son and to be deeply attached to his two daughters; if he had fathered an illegitimate son, Nishioka might have wondered whether the Chairman would become equally attached to that child and eventually leave him the company. This is presented as a plausible inference, not as the established reason for Nishioka’s decision. The narrator explicitly says that nobody told her why Nishioka changed his mind, and the book leaves the question unresolved.

The narrator’s guarded disclosure

The conjecture turns toward the narrator herself. She raises the possibility that she has given birth to a son of the Chairman’s, while refusing to confirm or deny it. She says that if she had, she would be reluctant to talk about him lest his identity become publicly known, and concludes that the best course is to say nothing. The passage thus places the succession crisis beside a deliberately withheld possibility: the Chairman’s lack of a son is part of the known context, while the existence and identity of any possible son remain undisclosed.

That reticence is consequential to the event’s meaning. Nishioka’s withdrawal is a concrete rupture in the Chairman’s public succession plan, but the narrator’s account also opens a private uncertainty that might help explain why such a plan could have seemed precarious to its intended heir. It does not resolve the mystery by turning speculation into fact. Instead, the narrative distinguishes what is known—the planned marriage, the intended inheritance, the withdrawal, and the Chairman’s distress—from what the narrator can only imagine.

From a failed marriage to another future

In the conversation at Eishin-an, the narrator tells the Chairman that she has been thinking about the Ichiriki Teahouse and missing the work of entertaining. She recognizes that returning to work in Gion is impossible, but asks whether there might be a place for a small teahouse in New York City. The Chairman initially says he does not understand why she would want to leave Japan. She answers that Japanese businessmen and politicians are increasingly present in New York, many of them men she has known for years, and points out that the Chairman himself will spend more time in the United States as he develops a plan to open a branch of his company there.

The proposed move is not presented as a direct solution to the failed succession arrangement. Rather, the withdrawal and the narrator’s request occupy the same unsettled period: the Chairman has been shaken by the collapse of his intended family future, while she begins to articulate a future of her own, grounded in her experience entertaining and in the business connections she already has. The episode therefore joins an exposed weakness in inheritance to a turn toward a life beyond Japan, without claiming that one definitively causes the other.