Eishin-an is the luxurious house the Chairman purchases in northeastern Kyoto after Sayuri becomes his mistress. Although intended for company guests, it is used more by the Chairman than anyone else, becoming the setting for evenings he and Sayuri spend together three or four nights a week, sometimes more. Its importance lies in the contrast it holds: a company property becomes the intimate domestic space of their relationship, and later the place where Sayuri tentatively imagines a life beyond Japan.

Purchase and Use

In the spring of the year after Sayuri becomes the Chairman’s mistress, he buys the house and names it Eishin-an, “Prosperous Truth Retreat.” The designation points to a formal purpose—lodging for company guests—but the actual rhythm of the place is shaped by the Chairman’s private visits. The house is not described as Sayuri’s permanent residence; it is where the two meet in the evenings, a recurring destination within the life they share.

Their visits follow a pattern calibrated to the Chairman’s work. On especially busy days, he arrives so late that he wants only to bathe while Sayuri talks with him, then fall asleep. More often he comes around sunset or soon afterward, eats dinner as they chat, and watches with her as the servants light the garden lanterns. The contrast between business pressures and the evening’s domestic routine gives Eishin-an its distinctive function: it is a place where the Chairman can set the day aside without leaving the world of his company altogether.

A Place to Unburden and Relax

At first, the Chairman often talks about the day’s work: a problem with a new product, a traffic accident involving a truckload of parts, or another business concern. Sayuri understands that he is not telling her these things chiefly to inform her. He is emptying his mind of them, as if draining water from a bucket. She therefore attends less to the business details than to his tone, listening for his voice to soften as he speaks. When it does, she changes the subject.

The conversations then turn to less serious matters: something that happened on his way to work, a film they watched at Eishin-an a few nights earlier, or a funny story Sayuri has heard from Mameha. Sometimes Mameha joins them. Sayuri describes the effect of this exchange through a comparison to a towel that has dried stiffly in the sun and is made supple again by water. The image makes the house a setting for a small, repeated restoration: the Chairman arrives burdened by work, and conversation helps him loosen its hold.

That change is also registered physically. When Sayuri first washes his hands with a hot cloth, his fingers feel rigid, like heavy twigs. After they have talked for a while, they bend gracefully, as if he were asleep. The hand-washing, the movement from work talk to playful conversation, and the gradual easing of his body make intimacy at Eishin-an a practice as much as a location. Sayuri expects this pattern—entertaining the Chairman in the evenings and filling her daylight hours as she can—to define her life.

The Veranda and a Possible Future

Eishin-an also frames a conversation that unsettles that expectation. After Nishioka Minoru changes his mind, Sayuri raises a delicate subject with the Chairman while they sit outdoors after dinner on the veranda overlooking the moss garden. He is brooding and has not spoken since before the meal. Sayuri begins by mentioning the Ichiriki Teahouse and admits that she has started to recognize how much she misses entertaining. The familiar house thus becomes the setting for her to articulate a desire that the couple’s established routine has not satisfied.

The Chairman responds first with silence: he takes a bite of ice cream and sets his spoon down. Sayuri acknowledges that she cannot return to work in Gion, then wonders whether there might be a place for a small teahouse in New York City. He says he does not know what she is talking about and sees no reason for her to leave Japan. Sayuri counters that Japanese businessmen and politicians are increasingly appearing in New York, many of them men she has known for years, and points to the Chairman’s own plan to open a branch of his company there. In this exchange, Eishin-an shifts from a retreat organized around his work and their private evenings into a place where Sayuri tests the possibility of shaping a future of her own.

Narrative Significance

The house gathers two scales of the Chairman and Sayuri’s relationship. Its regular meals and conversations show a shared life built from ordinary repetition, while its veranda becomes the scene of a proposal that looks beyond their established arrangement. The company’s guesthouse is, in practice, a private meeting place; the Chairman’s work enters their evenings, but Sayuri’s attentive listening helps turn those burdens toward talk and rest. Later, her New York suggestion makes clear that the same refuge can also hold disagreement and change.

Eishin-an therefore marks both the intimacy and the limits of the life Sayuri expects to lead. She has learned how to make the Chairman’s evenings gentler, yet she also misses entertaining and sees the company’s expanding American presence as an opening. The house does not itself resolve their future. Instead, it gives that question a concrete setting: after dinner, beside the moss garden, in a conversation that begins with a remembered teahouse and reaches toward New York.