Naná

Granny is the elderly authority in the Nitta household whose death by electrocution brings a decisive change to the household’s rooms, work, and apprenticeship arrangements. Chiyo initially knows her as a mean old woman, but an unexpected glimpse of her vulnerability prompts Chiyo to imagine the hardships that may lie behind that severity. After Granny dies, the labor and public rituals of her funeral make visible both her connections across Gion and the household’s need to maintain its standing.

Identity and Place in the Household

Granny lives in the Nitta okiya, where her authority and preferences shape domestic arrangements. The household has long been understaffed because she cannot tolerate crowding. She also possesses its only electric space heater, which she uses regularly in the colder months. The account presents her through the practical details of household life as well as through the authority she exercises over those around her.

Chiyo’s perspective on Granny is initially defined by their difference in age and power: Granny is a harsh old woman, while Chiyo is a struggling child. Yet Chiyo’s observations complicate that simple division. Granny is aging and vulnerable, and her place in the household does not erase the possibility that she, too, began life with little power over her circumstances.

Chiyo’s Changing View

One night, while the household prepares to sleep, Chiyo sees Granny changing into her sleeping robe. The sight leads Chiyo to reflect on Granny’s age and frailty. She imagines that Granny may have been sold into slavery as a child, and wonders whether she may have lost a sister. These details are Chiyo’s conjectures, not confirmed facts about Granny’s past; their importance lies in what they reveal about Chiyo’s developing capacity to imagine another person’s suffering.

Chiyo connects that possibility to her own thoughts about her parents and to the anger she remembers feeling after a boy pushed her into a thorn bush in Yoroido. If a brief humiliation could provoke such fury in a child, she reasons, a lifetime of suffering might turn anyone bitter. Her recollection of rain wearing down stone gives shape to that thought. Granny remains harsh in Chiyo’s view, but harshness no longer appears to be an essential quality: it may be something that a life of hardship produces.

Authority and Consequences in the Okiya

When Chiyo’s escape attempt ends in a fall and a broken arm, Auntie beats her and declares that she will never become a geisha. Chiyo then hears screams from elsewhere along the walkway: Granny is beating Pumpkin because Pumpkin failed to keep a closer watch on her. The incident places Granny’s authority within the household’s system of punishment and supervision. Chiyo’s attempted flight brings consequences not only for herself but also for Pumpkin, who is held responsible for failing to prevent it.

The incident does not make Granny’s motives or feelings explicit. Instead, it shows how the household’s discipline passes through its members: Granny punishes Pumpkin, Auntie punishes Chiyo, and the damage from Chiyo’s escape changes her prospects. The account of Chiyo’s later response to Granny’s vulnerability thus unfolds against a concrete memory of Granny’s severity, rather than replacing that severity with an uncomplicated portrait of kindness.

Death and Funeral

Months later, as the household switches from summer-weight underrobes to the unlined garments used in September, a maid notices an alarming smell coming from Granny’s room and fetches Auntie. Granny has died beside her electric heater. According to the police, her routine was to wrap the cord around the heater before pushing it against the wall. Over time, the hot metal burned through the cord; the exposed wire electrified the heater, and touching it left Granny immobilized and may have killed her at once. She was found on the floor beside it.

Granny’s death is presented through the ordinary habit that led to it: a heater she used regularly, a cord she wrapped around it each morning, and a device pushed back against the wall. The household’s seasonal change of clothing provides the temporal marker for the discovery, while the repeated routine explains the accident. Chiyo does not see Granny’s body after her death apart from her legs visible from the doorway, so the account remains focused on the discovery and its aftermath rather than a detailed depiction.

For the next week or two, the household cleans and prepares for the funeral, setting out candles, food offerings, lanterns, tea stands, and trays for visitors’ money. Mother arranges for sutras to be chanted at Chion-in Temple and buys lotus-bud arrangements from the undertaker, even during the Great Depression. Chiyo initially wonders whether this expenditure reflects deep grief; she later understands it as part of the public obligations of hosting Gion, whose members are expected to pay their respects and attend the funeral.

Gion’s Recognition and the Household’s Reorganization

Visitors include teahouse and okiya mistresses, maids who knew Granny, shopkeepers, wig makers, hairdressers, and many geisha. The older geisha remember Granny from her working days; some younger visitors have never heard of her and come instead out of respect for Mother or through their connection with Hatsumomo. The funeral therefore reveals a distinction between Granny’s own remembered past and the standing the household continues to maintain in the present.

Granny’s funeral takes place about a week after her death, on a morning selected by a fortune-teller. Once it is over, the okiya rearranges itself. Auntie moves downstairs into Granny’s former room, Pumpkin takes Auntie’s room upstairs, and two energetic, middle-aged maids arrive the following week. Mother’s decision to hire additional help reflects the fact that the household had been understaffed while Granny was alive, rather than simply the number of people now living there.

Pumpkin’s chores are removed so that she can devote her time to practicing the arts she will need as a geisha. She is a slow learner and needs extra practice, but Chiyo finds it painful to watch the opportunity opened for Pumpkin while she herself waits for a chance that may never come. Granny’s death thus alters the household in ways that affect Chiyo even after the funeral: rooms and duties are reassigned, Pumpkin’s training advances, and Chiyo’s own hopes remain uncertain. Her memory of Granny’s possible suffering and her awareness of the punishment Granny imposed belong side by side, making her death a point where domestic history, public obligation, and Chiyo’s precarious future meet.