Sayuri’s arranged meeting with the Minister and Nobu’s rejection marks the turning point at which Sayuri’s attempt to drive Nobu away instead opens the way for the Chairman to claim a place beside her. The Chairman tells Sayuri that Nobu has given her up, then explains that he disclosed the meeting to Nobu after learning it had been staged for Nobu to see. Nobu’s anger, in the Chairman’s reading, settles the question of whether Nobu could forgive her—and whether he was truly her destiny.

The encounter and its intended witness

The meeting with the Minister had been arranged for Nobu’s eyes. The Chairman says that after Pumpkin told him Sayuri’s purpose, he decided to tell Nobu what he had witnessed. The episode therefore turns on a divided audience: the Minister is the man Sayuri meets, but Nobu is the person whose reaction she seeks to provoke. The Chairman’s disclosure converts that private strategy into a confrontation between Sayuri and Nobu.

Nobu’s rejection and the Chairman’s judgment

The Chairman tells Sayuri, “Nobu gave you up, Sayuri. I've taken nothing away from him.” He presents himself not as the cause of Nobu’s loss but as someone who accepted what Nobu’s response had already made plain. When Nobu reacts angrily to the meeting, the Chairman concludes that Nobu could not forgive Sayuri and therefore had never truly been her destiny. His account makes Nobu’s rejection both an immediate consequence of Sayuri’s maneuver and the justification for the Chairman’s own intervention.

The Shirakawa memory and the fall

To explain what he saw in Sayuri, the Chairman recalls her eyes at the Shirakawa Stream, where, he says, she looked desperate, as if she might drown without rescue. Sayuri’s recollection then reaches further back, to childhood in Yoroido: a boy named Gisuke climbed too high in a tree above a pond too shallow for a safe jump. Afraid to climb down because of the rocks, he lost his grip; his father, Mr. Yamashita, arrived beneath him and caught him.

The remembered fall gives Sayuri a pattern for understanding the present. She compares herself to Gisuke, plummeting toward rocks, and sees the Chairman as the person who stepped forward to catch her. The image recasts the emotional aftermath of Nobu’s refusal as rescue, while also showing how the Chairman’s reading of Sayuri’s expression and her own childhood memory converge in her account of their relationship.

Rescue transformed into desire

The rescue image does not remain purely protective. Sayuri describes the Chairman gathering her into his arms and kissing the exposed skin at her throat; the urgency of the kiss recalls a maid in the okiya who had tried to hide a ripe pear while eating it, overcome by craving. The movement from falling, to being caught, to physical desire binds the event’s emotional reversal to Sayuri’s language of rescue and appetite. It makes the Chairman’s declaration that he took nothing from Nobu more complicated: the scene presents him as a rescuer, but also as the man who moves into the space Nobu’s anger has opened.