The United States is first presented through the Chairman’s astonishment at its postwar prosperity, then through Sayuri’s travels there with him and, finally, as the place where she establishes a new home and a small teahouse. Its significance lies in this progression: a country initially described as an almost unimaginable contrast to Japan becomes the setting in which Sayuri can leave Gion behind without relinquishing the social skills and connections she formed there.

Prosperity and First Impressions

The Chairman’s first trip to the United States makes a powerful impression on him, and his comparisons give the country a material vividness. In Japan, he tells Sayuri, electricity is available only at certain hours, while American cities are lit around the clock. Kyoto takes pride in the concrete floor of its new train station, but American stations have floors of solid marble. Even small-town movie theaters seem as grand as Japan’s National Theater, and public bathrooms are spotless. The most striking comparison is the refrigerator: an average American worker can buy one with a month’s wages, whereas a Japanese worker needs fifteen months’ wages. Through these particulars, the United States represents not an abstraction called modernity but a daily abundance beyond the reach of most people in Japan.

Sayuri accompanies the Chairman on his second American trip in the fall of 1952. She travels alone by rail to Tokyo and flies with him to Hawaii, where he buys her the first bathing suit she has ever owned. Sitting on the beach with her hair at her shoulders, she sees herself among other women in a setting that briefly recalls Amami, though she worries the resemblance might also occur to the Chairman. They continue to Los Angeles and then New York. Having known the country only through movies, Sayuri has scarcely believed that New York’s great buildings could really exist. From her room at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, however, she looks out at the buildings and clean streets and feels she has entered a world where anything might be possible.

Travel with the Chairman

Sayuri expects that leaving Japan for such an unfamiliar place will make her feel like a child separated from her mother. Instead, the Chairman’s enthusiasm helps her approach the visit with goodwill. He keeps a separate room, mostly for business, but spends each night in the suite he has arranged for her. Sometimes she wakes to find him seated in the dark by the window, holding back the sheer curtain as he looks down at Park Avenue. On one occasion, after two in the morning, he takes her hand and brings her to the window to watch a young couple in formal clothes kissing beneath a street lamp. The city is thus encountered not only through its wealth and scale but through the quiet intimacy of the Chairman’s nightly presence.

Over the next three years, Sayuri accompanies him on two more trips to the United States. While he conducts business during the day, she and her maid visit museums and restaurants and attend a ballet, which she finds breathtaking. In New York, one of the few Japanese restaurants they find is managed by a chef Sayuri knew in Gion before the war. During lunch in the restaurant’s private room, she entertains men she has not seen in years: a vice president of Nippon Telephone & Telegraph, Japan’s new consul-general, formerly the mayor of Kobe, and a professor of political science from Kyoto University. Among these familiar people and professional connections, New York can feel almost like a return to Gion. The resemblance is social rather than geographic: the city offers a new setting in which Sayuri’s old acquaintance and talent for entertaining remain valuable.

A New Home and Livelihood

By 1956, the Chairman plans to spend more time in the United States because he intends to open a branch of his company there. Sayuri proposes that New York could accommodate a small teahouse, pointing out that Japanese businessmen and politicians are increasingly common in the city and that many are men she has known for years. Her suggestion is practical as well as personal: it joins an existing clientele to the Chairman’s business plans and offers her a future outside Gion. She also implies that a woman with a child raised between two cultures might choose to make the United States a permanent home and never bring the child back to Japan. The Chairman understands that she is offering to remove the only obstacle to Nishioka Minoru’s adoption as his heir. His brief startled expression gives way to a tear, which he quickly blinks away.

In August of that year, Sayuri moves to New York City and opens a very small teahouse for Japanese businessmen and politicians traveling through the United States. Mother tries to make the enterprise an extension of the Nitta okiya, but the Chairman refuses. In Gion, Mother’s authority over Sayuri had been tied to her continued presence there; by leaving, Sayuri breaks those ties. The Chairman sends two accountants to ensure that Mother gives Sayuri every yen to which she is entitled. The move therefore changes more than Sayuri’s address: it ends the okiya’s hold over her livelihood and gives her a business on terms that are not controlled by Mother.

The move does not begin without fear. Sayuri recalls being afraid when the door of her apartment in the Waldorf Towers first closes behind her. But New York soon feels at least as much like home as Gion, and memories of the many long weeks she spends there with the Chairman make her life in the United States richer in some respects than her life in Japan. Her teahouse, on the second floor of an old club off Fifth Avenue, is modestly successful from the outset. Geisha come from Gion to work with her, and Mameha sometimes visits. Sayuri later goes to the teahouse herself mainly when close friends or old acquaintances are in town, so the business becomes an established place of connection rather than the sole occupation of her new life.

Expatriate Life and Distance from Gion

Sayuri’s days in New York bring together continued study, friendship, and the practices of her former profession. In the mornings, she joins local Japanese writers and artists to study subjects such as poetry, music, and, in one month-long session, the history of New York City. She has lunch with a friend most days. In the afternoons, she prepares at her makeup stand for parties, sometimes held in her own apartment. When she lifts the brocade cover on her mirror, the sight recalls the milky odor of the white makeup she wore so often in Gion. The gesture makes the old world present without making a return to it possible: Sayuri still applies herself to the work of entertaining, but the setting and terms of her life have changed.

She wishes she could visit Gion, yet expects that its changes would disturb her. Photographs brought by friends make the district seem thinned out, like a neglected garden overtaken by weeds. After Mother’s death, the Nitta okiya is demolished and replaced by a small concrete building, with a bookshop below and two apartments above. The scale of the replacement sharpens the contrast between Sayuri’s remembered Gion and the altered place it has become. New York is not simply an escape from the old district; it is the home from which she watches the old social world recede.

That recession is measurable as well as personal. Eight hundred geisha worked in Gion when Sayuri first arrived; now fewer than sixty remain, including only a handful of apprentices, and the number continues to fall. The novel places this decline beside Sayuri’s New York life, where geisha from Gion still come to work with her, preserving some professional continuity even as the community at home contracts. Her departure is consequently both a personal break and part of a larger change that she cannot reverse.

The United States as a Lasting Home

On the Chairman’s last visit to New York, he and Sayuri walk through Central Park and speak about the past. Among a path lined with pine trees, the Chairman stops. Sayuri knows that he is remembering the pines beside the street outside Osaka where he grew up; he rests both frail hands on his cane, closes his eyes, and breathes deeply. The scene turns the United States into a place where Japanese memories can be carried and revisited, not merely a foreign landscape opposed to Japan. For Sayuri, too, New York gathers the years she spent with the Chairman while making room for friendships, study, and work of her own. Its decisive importance is not that it erases her Gion life, but that it becomes a home capacious enough to contain its memories after the world that formed them has begun to disappear.