Satsu (Yukiyo) and Tanaka Ichiro

Satsu (Yukiyo) and Tanaka Ichiro are joined not by a sustained personal bond but by the decision that removes her from her family and sends her toward a separate, more brutal fate. Through Sayuri’s recollection, Tanaka’s cultivated appearance as a benefactor is gradually overturned: he negotiates with the girls’ father, then delivers them into arrangements that divide the sisters and expose Satsu to sexual exploitation. The relationship’s significance lies in that reversal, and in the way later favors and patronage cannot undo the original betrayal.

The negotiation and departure

Tanaka’s role begins at the family table. Sayuri returns home to find him speaking privately with her father, serious enough that neither man notices her in the entryway. Tanaka asks what her father thinks of his proposal. Her father hesitates because he cannot picture the girls living anywhere else; Tanaka answers that they will be better off, and so will their father, and instructs him to send them to the village the following afternoon. The exchange is brief, but its terms are decisive: the girls’ future is negotiated between two adult men, while the children themselves remain outside the conversation.

When the journey does not lead to Tanaka’s home, Sayuri realizes that the promise of rescue has given way to a transaction. The wagon stops beside the train tracks, among people waiting with sacks and crates, where Tanaka introduces the sisters to Mr. Bekku. Tanaka has also brought Sugi from Yoroido, offering him to accompany the group because he knows the girls. This practical arrangement makes the departure appear organized and almost ordinary; the setting among travelers and their belongings gives no sign of the rupture it will mean for the sisters.

The separation becomes unmistakable when they arrive in the city. At the doorway where Mr. Bekku tells Sayuri to get out, Satsu tries to follow, but he pushes her back with his long arm and tells her to stay because she is going elsewhere. The sisters meet each other’s gaze and, for a moment, understand one another completely. Sayuri is dragged inside amid women’s voices and commotion, while Satsu is left behind. Tanaka is not present at the doorway in this account, but the separation follows from the journey he arranged and the transfer he had set in motion.

Sayuri’s judgment of Tanaka

The narrative initially presents Tanaka as a person in whom a frightened child can invest hope. Sayuri remembers fantasizing that he might adopt her, and later recalls the comfort she sought in that possibility. That expectation makes the eventual recognition especially severe: the man she had taken for kind and worldly is, in her adult understanding, the person who took her from her parents and sold her, while selling Satsu into something worse.

Sayuri arrives at this judgment during a rainy evening in Gion. Looking through a fence at a teahouse party, she thinks of her earlier experience peering into a teahouse with Tanaka’s daughter, Kuniko; the memory stirs the old heaviness of loss. Her thoughts return to Tanaka, and she names what had happened without the child’s earlier illusions. She decides she will never return to Yoroido—or, if she does, it will be to tell him how much she hates him. The scene turns the journey’s outward separation into an inward break: Tanaka is no longer a possible rescuer but the object of an anger grounded in what he did to both sisters.

Unequal fates and later traces

The sisters’ separation is also a divergence in the conditions imposed on them. Sayuri’s retrospective account explicitly contrasts her own sale with Satsu’s worse fate, and elsewhere describes the places in Miyagawa-cho where men seek sexual access to women in unpleasant houses. The evidence does not show Tanaka and Satsu meeting again or describe his conduct toward her after the departure. What it does establish is that his decision helped place her on a path Sayuri understands as more degrading and dangerous than her own.

Tanaka’s later presence in Sayuri’s memories is complicated by the continuing material influence of his household. When Sayuri learns that Mameha’s wealthy danna has bought many of her robes, she also explains that a patron can supply resources that shape a geisha’s professional prospects. Much later, Nobu offers to become Sayuri’s danna, and Mother insists that the business decision belongs to her, describing his offer as one no sensible person would reject. These later arrangements are not evidence of Tanaka’s continued relationship with Satsu; rather, they illuminate the world in which women’s futures are repeatedly negotiated through money, protection, and the authority of household heads.

That pattern has a particularly sharp consequence in Sayuri’s own life. The General’s patronage covers expenses including lessons, registration, and medical care, and his position in military procurement enables him to obtain medicine for Auntie and send scarce goods to the okiya. Yet a later arrangement with the Chairman also requires Mother’s consent and a substantial monthly payment to the okiya before Sayuri can leave her geisha career while remaining a member of the household. These episodes belong to Sayuri’s later history, not to Satsu’s known story, but they echo the earlier structure: a woman’s future is shaped by negotiations among men and the household that claims an economic interest in her.

Significance of the relationship

Tanaka and Satsu’s connection is defined by a profound asymmetry. He participates in the decision and the arrangements that move the sisters away from home; Satsu, as far as the evidence shows, has no voice in the negotiation and no continuing relationship with him on the page. The contrast between her father’s reluctance and Tanaka’s assurance that the girls will be better off exposes how the language of care can accompany an act that deprives children of choice.

For Sayuri, the later knowledge of Satsu’s fate changes the meaning of her own departure. What had once looked like a route toward adoption or rescue becomes the beginning of a separation arranged for others’ purposes. The sisters’ brief, wordless recognition at the doorway preserves a bond that the transaction cannot erase, while Sayuri’s subsequent hatred of Tanaka records the cost of discovering that the person she trusted was implicated in both their losses.