Kyoto University is the setting for a sumo exhibition where Sayuri, accompanying Mameha, meets Iwamura Ken and Nobu Toshikazu—and unexpectedly recognizes Mr. Tanaka, the man who had taken her from her village. The campus’s unfamiliar surroundings and the university’s old Exhibition Hall frame a turning point in which Sayuri’s new life in Gion collides with her remembered past.

Campus and Exhibition Setting

Mameha tells Sayuri that they will attend the exhibition as guests of Iwamura Ken, founder of Iwamura Electric, and that Nobu, the company president and a sumo enthusiast, helped organize it. They travel north from Gion by rickshaw, and the university campus feels foreign to Sayuri: Western-style buildings, young male students, and the attention directed at the two geisha make her newly aware of how much Gion has come to feel like home.

The event is held in Kyoto University's old Exhibition Hall, one of the few indoor venues in Kyoto suitable for sumo. The account describes a large, weathered building among newer Western structures. Inside, sunlight enters through high screened windows above a crowd; at the center stands the raised square ring beneath a shrine-style roof, where a priest performs a blessing. These surroundings place a traditional exhibition within a campus landscape that Sayuri experiences as unfamiliar and socially exposed.

The Exhibition and Its Guests

Sayuri enters with Mameha and is led to a front tier, where they remove their shoes and walk in split-toed socks along a narrow wooden margin. She identifies Nobu when he waves to Mameha. His visible facial scarring, which Mameha had warned her about, makes Sayuri anxious about how to behave when introduced to him; she worries she might offend him without realizing it.

The exhibition also connects the university setting to the history of Iwamura Electric. Mameha explains that the company manufactured the heater whose accident killed Granny. The gathering therefore brings Sayuri into the orbit of the people who lead the company, even as the venue is principally presented as a place for sumo and an occasion for formal social contact.

Mr. Tanaka's Recognition

As Mameha leads her toward Nobu, Sayuri notices an elegant man seated beside him, wearing a pinstripe men's kimono. Before she can make sense of why he seems familiar, she recalls an image of him turning toward her on the streets of her village. She then recognizes him as Mr. Tanaka, whose earlier intervention had set her journey away from home in motion.

The recognition makes the exhibition hall more than a backdrop for Sayuri's introduction to influential company figures. At Kyoto University, a public gathering in her adopted world abruptly reopens the personal history she carries from the village. The scene's movement from campus unfamiliarity to recognition gives the university a distinct narrative role: it is where the life Sayuri has built in Gion and the past she thought she had left behind meet in the same room.