Kyoto University's old Exhibition Hall is the weathered indoor venue where Sayuri attends a sumo exhibition with Mameha. Set amid the university’s Western-style buildings, it makes Sayuri feel out of place and then brings her into the orbit of Nobu and the Chairman; its old, discordant architecture also echoes the fragile home she has left behind.

Setting and Exterior

The Exhibition Hall stood on the Kyoto University campus, reached by a dirt path lined with small pine trees and an iron gate. Around it, Western-style university buildings had windows divided into small panes by painted wooden strips. The students watching Mameha and Sayuri pass—young men with parted hair, some wearing suspenders—made the two women seem conspicuous and exotic. The contrast sharpens Sayuri’s sense that Gion has become home: she realizes how much she belongs there precisely when the university makes her feel out of place.

The hall itself was a large, boxlike building that seemed ill-fitted to its surroundings. Its roof looked too slight for its bulk, and its huge doors had warped until they bulged against the iron rods fastened across them. Sayuri compares the building’s relation to the newer structures around it to that of an old man in a kimono among businessmen. Its roughness also recalls her childhood home, the “tipsy house,” and the resemblance briefly makes her sad. The hall is therefore more than a venue: its visible age and mismatch turn the unfamiliar campus into an unexpected prompt for memory.

The Exhibition Interior

Inside, Sayuri first sees an enormous open space rising to the roof, with sunlight falling through screened windows high overhead. The crowd’s noise fills the hall, mingling with smoke from sweet-rice cakes roasted with miso paste on grills outside. At the center stands the square mound where the wrestlers will compete, beneath a roof modeled on a Shinto shrine. A priest circles it, chanting blessings and shaking a sacred wand decorated with folded paper strips. The spectacle combines a packed public gathering with ritual preparations around the ring.

Mameha leads Sayuri to a front tier, where they remove their shoes and walk along a narrow wooden margin in split-toed socks. Their hosts are seated in the same row, on tatami mats. The route through the hall brings Sayuri from the broad, impersonal crowd toward a small, socially consequential encounter: she recognizes Nobu as Mameha’s acquaintance and then notices the elegant man seated beside him.

Encounters and Narrative Significance

The hall is where Sayuri sees Nobu for the first time. His face bears the effects of terrible burns, an appearance Mameha had warned her might startle her. Already unsettled by spotting Korin, a friend of Hatsumomo, in the courtyard, Sayuri worries that she may behave foolishly when introduced to Nobu. The venue gathers potentially awkward social encounters into one visit, even as the exhibition itself provides the public occasion for them.

Beside Nobu sits the Chairman, whom Sayuri recognizes before she can understand why he seems familiar. She has initially seen only the back of his head, yet his presence evokes an image of him turning toward her on the streets of her village. The hall thus links her present life in Gion with the remembered encounter that preceded it. Its aging structure, like the memory it stirs, stands between past and present: a place where a public outing unexpectedly opens onto the personal history that will shape Sayuri’s future.