Impermanence

Impermanence in Memoirs of a Geisha is both the erosion of a world and the persistence of what it leaves within those who survive it. Through Sayuri’s reflections on a diminished Gion, the Chairman’s death, and memories of people she has lost, change becomes a force that dissolves places and relationships into the past while allowing them to endure inwardly.

A Changing Gion

From New York, Sayuri measures change against the Gion she remembers. Eight hundred geisha worked there when she first arrived; now fewer than sixty remain, including only a handful of apprentices, and their numbers continue to dwindle. The decline makes the district seem like a poorly kept garden overrun with weeds: not simply altered, but losing the life and order that once defined it.

The Nitta okiya’s fate gives that transformation a concrete form. After Mother’s death, the house was torn down and replaced by a small concrete building, with a bookshop at street level and two apartments above. The site persists, but its former identity has disappeared. For Sayuri, the replacement is part of a broader lesson: even places that once seemed like the fixed ground of a life can be remade beyond recognition.

Memory Beside the Present

Sayuri’s account does not treat memory as an exact refuge from change. On a walk through Central Park, she and the Chairman pass a path among pine trees. He stops, leaning on his cane, and recalls the pines beside the street outside Osaka where he grew up. His closed eyes and deep breath mark a moment in which a distant childhood landscape rises into the present. He tells her, “Sometimes, I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.”

The remembered pines connect the Chairman’s earlier life to his last years with Sayuri, but the scene also makes memory’s power inseparable from loss: what he remembers is vivid precisely because it is no longer present. Sayuri’s own New York life carries a similar doubleness. She prepares for parties at her apartment and, when she lifts the cover from her mirror, recalls the milky odor of the white makeup she wore in Gion. The familiar act of preparing herself brings back the vanished world of her former profession without restoring it.

Loss and Inward Continuance

As the Chairman grows frail, Sayuri fears the approaching separation. After a night together, she dreams of an elderly man describing how his beloved wife continues to live within him through the pleasure of their shared life. In the dream, Sayuri drinks extraordinary soup, and its briny taste becomes an image of taking the dead and absent into herself. She thinks of her sister Satsu, who left when they were young; her parents; Mr. Tanaka; Nobu; and the Chairman.

The dream does not deny that these people have died, left, or become estranged. Instead, it gives their continued presence a different form: they remain part of Sayuri’s inward life. When the Chairman dies a few months later, she understands his departure as natural, like leaves falling from trees. The comparison acknowledges the finality of death while placing it within a recurring process of change. Her grief is real, but it does not make their shared past vanish.

The Shape of a Life

Looking back, Sayuri describes her attachment to the Chairman through the image of a stone falling toward the earth. She also sees earlier events—cutting her lip and meeting Mr. Tanaka, and her mother’s death followed by her being sold—as a stream tumbling over rocky cliffs on its way to the ocean. These images present a life shaped by forces and turns whose consequences accumulate, even when their direction could not be fully understood at the time. The movement toward an ending does not erase the particular losses along the way.

Sayuri’s final reflection extends impermanence from her own story to the world around her. Crossing Park Avenue, she notices the yellow taxis and the perplexed women with briefcases looking at a little old Japanese woman in kimono. Yet she questions whether returning to Yoroido would make that place any less strange. The places that once seemed fixed have all become unfamiliar in their own way; neither arrival nor return can recover an untouched home.

She concludes that the world is “no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean,” and that struggles and triumphs eventually bleed together “just like watery ink on paper.” The images do not make experience meaningless. They describe how distinct events lose their sharp outlines over time, even as Sayuri’s act of telling her life allows its people and losses to remain present in memory. Impermanence is therefore both dissolution and continuity: the world changes beyond recovery, but what has been loved can still be carried within the person who remembers it.