1956

1956 is the year Sayuri leaves Gion for New York, transforming a life long organized around the geisha district into one she can shape beyond Mother’s authority. The move comes amid the Chairman’s failed succession plan: Nishioka Minoru withdraws from his planned marriage to the Chairman’s eldest daughter and refuses the Iwamura name and inheritance. Sayuri’s departure both breaks her own ties to the Nitta household and opens a way for the Chairman to reconsider his heir.

The failed succession plan

In the summer of 1956, the Chairman, who had two daughters but no son, arranged for his eldest daughter to marry Nishioka Minoru. His intention was for Nishioka to take the Iwamura family name and become his heir. At the last moment, however, Nishioka changed his mind and told the Chairman he would not go through with the wedding. The refusal left the Chairman without the succession arrangement he had sought.

The Chairman was unusually shaken by the reversal. For a week or more he was upset and snapped at servants and Sayuri without provocation; she had never seen him so disturbed. She does not learn directly why Nishioka withdrew. Instead, she connects the decision to a scandal from the previous summer, when a powerful insurance-company founder replaced his firstborn son with a younger illegitimate son by a Tokyo geisha. The parallel gives Nishioka’s decision an intelligible context without establishing his private reasons as fact.

Sayuri leaves Gion

In August, Sayuri moved to New York City to establish a small teahouse serving Japanese businessmen and politicians traveling in the United States. Mother tried to make the venture an extension of the Nitta okiya, carrying her influence beyond Gion, but the Chairman refused to allow that arrangement. His intervention made the business Sayuri’s rather than the okiya’s.

Leaving also changed the balance of power between Sayuri and Mother. Mother’s authority over her had depended on her remaining in Gion; by moving away, Sayuri broke those ties. The Chairman sent two accountants to ensure Mother gave Sayuri every yen to which she was entitled, turning the departure into a material settlement as well as a personal separation.

A new home and continuing ties

The first closing of the door behind her at her apartment in the Waldorf Towers frightened Sayuri, but New York soon came to feel at least as much like home as Gion. Her modest teahouse, on the second floor of an old club off Fifth Avenue, was successful from the beginning. Geisha came from Gion to work there, and Mameha sometimes visited, so the move created distance from the old district without erasing its relationships or practices.

Sayuri’s life in New York also retained a social world of Japanese friends and acquaintances. She studied poetry, music, and other subjects with local Japanese writers and artists, and met friends for lunch. When visitors brought photographs from Kyoto, however, she found herself thinking of Gion as a garden thinning and filling with weeds. The year marks not a clean severance from her former home, but a change in where she lives and who controls the terms of her life there.