Obon

Obon, the annual festival for welcoming the spirits of the dead, appears in Sayuri’s memories as a night of communal ceremony and maternal protection. Recalled from her childhood in Yoroido, it gives her an image of her mother that resurfaces amid later separation and grief, linking ritual remembrance to the fragile persistence of family ties.

The childhood festival

When Sayuri was four, the village observed Obon through several evenings of ceremonies in the graveyard and fires outside house entrances to guide the spirits home. On the final night, villagers gathered at a Shinto shrine on rocks overlooking the inlet. Colored paper lanterns hung on ropes between the trees, and Sayuri danced with her mother and the other villagers to drums and flute music. When the child grew tired, her mother cradled her at the edge of the clearing.

The scene turns abruptly when wind rises off the cliffs and sets one lantern alight. The burning lantern breaks free, drifts down, then catches the wind and rolls toward mother and daughter, trailing gold sparks. As the fire rises toward them, Sayuri’s mother releases her and throws her arms into the flames to scatter them. Sparks and shreds of fire surround them, but the burning fragments drift into the trees and go out; neither is hurt. The episode makes the festival’s welcome to the dead coincide with an immediate encounter with danger, answered by the mother’s physical act of protection.

A memory amid childhood distress

The adult narrator places this recollection within a period when she was tormented and fantasized that Mr. Tanaka might adopt her. When troubled, she returned in her mind to the image of her mother as she had been before the pain that made her groan in the mornings. Obon is therefore not simply a remembered custom: it preserves a picture of maternal care from before the family’s suffering and separation.

The memory’s vividness rests on concrete contrasts: the shrine above the inlet, the village ceremony and music, the lantern’s beautiful gold trail, and the fire that threatens the child her mother holds. The festival does not erase danger or grief; instead, the mother’s rescue gives the remembered night a lasting form of safety that the older Sayuri can revisit when her childhood offers little other comfort.

Objects of remembrance and later returns

Years later, a package from Mr. Tanaka brings Sayuri the small mortuary tablets that had stood before the altar in her childhood home. Two tablets bear unfamiliar Buddhist names, and their arrival makes the absent family materially present while also confirming how much remains unknown to her. The tablets become objects of remembrance connected to the home and the people she lost, echoing Obon’s rites for the dead without reproducing the festival itself.

During the journey to Hakone, the sight of another railway platform prompts Sayuri to remember being taken from home with her sister, Satsu. She recognizes how thoroughly her years in Gion had narrowed her sense of the world, and the recalled grief opens again as she travels beyond Kyoto. The festival’s early image of her mother thus belongs to a larger pattern in which the past returns through particular places and objects, rather than remaining safely sealed away.

Remembrance across a lifetime

At another moment of despair, Sayuri nearly lets the Chairman’s handkerchief blow into the darkness. She stops, remembering the mortuary tablets sent by Mr. Tanaka and reasoning that something must be kept to remember those who have left: the tablets preserve her childhood, while the handkerchief will preserve the remainder of her life. Obon’s association with welcoming the dead resonates here as a continuing practice of keeping the departed present through memory and objects.

In old age, the Chairman reflects that remembered things can feel more real than what is seen. Sayuri’s own recollections repeatedly give that thought form: her mother’s arms scattering the fire, the tablets from the old house, and the handkerchief held against a possible loss. Obon stands at the beginning of this chain of memory, a communal rite transformed by personal recollection into an enduring image of protection, absence, and the effort to remember.