1952

In 1952, Sayuri accompanies the Chairman on his second trip to the United States, traveling from Kyoto through Hawaii and Los Angeles to New York City. The journey marks a decisive widening of their shared life: for Sayuri, an unfamiliar country becomes a place of possibility, while the trip also sets the journey’s scenes against the losses and memories that continue to shape her past and future.

The journey and its setting

The Chairman’s enthusiasm for the United States had been kindled on his previous visit. Its everyday signs of prosperity impressed him: American cities kept their lights burning around the clock, train stations had marble floors, and even small towns had grand movie theaters. Most astonishing to him was the price of a refrigerator: an average American worker could buy one with a month’s wages, whereas a Japanese worker needed fifteen months’ wages. His account of these contrasts helps explain why the journey mattered to him as more than a change of scenery.

Sayuri traveled alone by rail to Tokyo, then flew with the Chairman to Hawaii. He bought her a bathing suit, the first she had owned, and she sat on the beach with her hair down at her shoulders, among other women. Hawaii recalled Amami to her, a resemblance she worried might strike the Chairman as well, though he said nothing. From there they continued to Los Angeles and then New York City. Having known the United States only through movies, Sayuri had not quite believed that New York’s great buildings existed. At the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, its towering buildings and clean streets opened to her a vision of a world where anything seemed possible.

A shared life in a foreign city

The Chairman kept a separate room for business but spent each night in the suite he had arranged for Sayuri. In the unfamiliar bed, she sometimes awoke to find him sitting by the window, holding open the sheer curtain and looking down at Park Avenue. On one night, after two in the morning, he took her by the hand to watch a young couple in formal dress kissing beneath a streetlamp. The small scene belonged to a city whose scale and customs were new to Sayuri, but it also shows the intimacy of the life she and the Chairman made during their travels.

Memory, distance, and loss

The significance of 1952 rests not only in the journey’s novelty but in the way distance draws older losses back into view. Years earlier, receiving a package from Mr. Tanaka, Sayuri had hoped it might free her from the okiya. Instead, Auntie opened it to find a wooden box containing the mortuary tablets from Sayuri’s childhood home, including two bearing unfamiliar Buddhist names. The tablets became a material remnant of a life she could not recover. Later, on the way to Hakone, traveling outside Kyoto stirred memories of leaving home with Mr. Bekku and of Satsu and her parents. She recognized how completely Gion had come to occupy her attention, and how grief could return without invitation.

That pattern of memory persists in the later years of her life with the Chairman. On his last visit to New York City, a path through pine trees in Central Park recalled the trees near Osaka where he had grown up. He paused with both hands on his cane, eyes closed, breathing in the remembered scent. His observation that remembered things could seem more real than what was before him gives voice to a shared condition: the past remains present through places, objects, and recollection, even as the world around them changes.

The year in the arc of Sayuri’s life

The account of 1952 is part of Sayuri’s retrospective narration, which places the trip within a longer passage from childhood separation to life with the Chairman. The mortuary tablets and the Chairman’s handkerchief serve as distinct markers of that passage: the tablets preserve what remained of her childhood, while the handkerchief becomes the keepsake associated with the rest of her life. In the final reflections, the Chairman’s advancing frailty and death sharpen the journey’s meaning. The year stands at once for shared possibility abroad and for the continuing presence of what time cannot restore.