“Well, I’ll leave the two of you. I’m going to send up some of that fresh, chilled sake I mentioned. Unless you think I should save it for the next time Nobu-san comes?”
“Don’t bother,” he said. “We’ll make do with the sake we have.”
“Nobu-san is… quite all right, isn’t he?”
“Oh, yes,” said the Chairman. “Quite all right.”
I was relieved to hear this; but at the same time I felt myself growing sick with shame. If the Chairman hadn’t come to give me news about Nobu, he’d come for some other reason-probably to berate me for what I’d done. In the few days since returning to Kyoto, I’d tried not to imagine what he must have seen: the Minister with his pants undone, me with my bare legs protruding from my disordered kimono…
When the mistress left the room, the sound of the door closing behind her was like a sword being drawn from its sheath.
“May I please say, Chairman,” I began as steadily as I could, “that my behavior on Amami-”
“I know what you’re thinking, Sayuri. But I haven’t come here to ask for your apology. Sit quietly a moment. I want to tell you about something that happened quite a number of years ago.”
“Chairman, I feel so confused,” I managed to say. “Please forgive me, but-”
“Just listen. You’ll understand soon enough why I’m telling it to you. Do you recall a restaurant named Tsumiyo? It closed toward the end of the Depression, but… well, never mind; you were very young at the time. In any case, one day quite some years ago-eighteen years ago, to be exact-I went there for lunch with several of my associates. We were accompanied by a certain geisha named Izuko, from the Pontocho district.”
I recognized Izuko’s name at once.
“She was everybody’s favorite back in those days,” the Chairman went on. “We happened to finish up our lunch a bit early, so I suggested we take a stroll by the Shirakawa Stream on our way to the theater.”
By this time I’d removed the Chairman’s handkerchief from my obi; and now, silently, I spread it onto the table and smoothed it so that his monogram was clearly visible. Over the years the handkerchief had taken on a stain in one corner, and the linen had yellowed; but the Chairman seemed to recognize it at once. His words trailed off, and he picked it up.
“Where did you get this?”
“Chairman,” I said, “all these years I’ve wondered if you knew I was the little girl you’d spoken to. You gave me your handkerchief that very afternoon, on your way to see the play Shibaraku. You also gave me a coin-”
“Do you mean to say… even when you were an apprentice, you knew that I was the man who’d spoken to you?”
“I recognized the Chairman the moment I saw him again, at the sumo tournament. To tell the truth, I’m amazed the Chairman remembered me.”
“Well, perhaps you ought to look at yourself in the mirror sometime, Sayuri. Particularly when your eyes are wet from crying, because they become… I can’t explain it. I felt I was seeing right through them. You know, I spend so much of my time seated across from men who are never quite telling me the truth; and here was a girl who’d never laid eyes on me before, and yet was willing to let me see straight into her.”
And then the Chairman interrupted himself.
“Didn’t you ever wonder why Mameha became your older sister?” he asked me.
“Mameha?” I said. “I don’t understand. What does Mameha have to do with it?”
“You really don’t know, do you?”
“Know what, Chairman?”
“Sayuri, I am the one who asked Mameha to take you under her care. I told her about a beautiful young girl I’d met, with startling gray eyes, and asked that she help you if she ever came upon you in Gion. I said I would cover her expenses if necessary. And she did come upon you, only a few months later. From what she’s told me over the years, you would certainly never have become a geisha without her help.”
It’s almost impossible to describe the effect the Chairman’s words had on me. I’d always taken it for granted that Mameha’s mission had been personal-to rid herself and Gion of Hatsumomo. Now that I understood her real motive, that I’d come under her tutelage because of the Chairman… well, I felt I would have to look back at all the comments she’d ever made to me and wonder about the real meaning behind them. And it wasn’t just Mameha who’d suddenly been transformed in my eyes; even I seemed to myself to be a different woman. When my gaze fell upon my hands in my lap, I saw them as hands the Chairman had made. I felt exhilarated, and frightened, and grateful all at once. I moved away from the table to bow and express my gratitude to him; but before I could even do it, I had to say:
“Chairman, forgive me, but I so wish that at some time years ago, you could have told me about… all of this. I can’t say how much it would have meant to me.”
“There’s a reason why I never could, Sayuri, and why I had to insist that Mameha not tell you either. It has to do with Nobu.”
To hear mention of Nobu’s name, all the feeling drained out of me-for I had the sudden notion that I understood where the Chairman had been leading all along.
“Chairman,” I said, “I know I’ve been unworthy of your kindness. This past weekend, when I-”
“I confess, Sayuri,” he interrupted, “that what happened on Amami has been very much on my mind.”
I could feel the Chairman looking at me; I couldn’t possibly have looked back at him.
“There’s something I want to discuss with you,” he went on. “I’ve been wondering all day how to go about it. I keep thinking of something that happened many years ago. I’m sure there must be a better way to explain myself, but… I do hope you’ll understand what I’m trying to say.”
Here he paused to take off his jacket and fold it on the mats beside him. I could smell the starch in his shirt, which made me think of visiting the General at the Suruya Inn and his room that often smelled of ironing.
“Back when Iwamura Electric was still a young company,” the Chairman began, “I came to know a man named Ikeda, who worked for one of our suppliers on the other side of town. He was a genius at solving wiring problems. Sometimes when we had difficulty with an installation, we asked to borrow him for a day, and he straightened everything out for us. Then one afternoon when I was rushing home from work, I happened to run into him at the pharmacist. He told me he was feeling very relaxed, because he’d quit his job. When I asked him why he’d done it, he said, ‘The time came to quit. So I quit!’ Well, I hired him right there on the spot. Then a few weeks later I asked him again, ‘Ikeda-san, why did you quit your job across town?’ He said to me, ‘Mr. Iwamura, for years I wanted to come and work for your company. But you never asked me. You always called on me when you had a problem, but you never asked me to work for you. Then one day I realized that you never would ask me, because you didn’t want to hire me away from one of your suppliers and jeopardize your business relationship. Only if I quit my job first, would you then have the opportunity to hire me. So I quit.’ ”
I knew the Chairman was waiting for me to respond; but I didn’t dare speak.
“Now, I’ve been thinking,” he went on, “that perhaps your encounter with the Minister was like Ikeda quitting his job. And I’ll tell you why this thought has been on my mind. It’s something Pumpkin said after she took me down to the theater. I was extremely angry with her, and I demanded she tell me why she’d done it. For the longest time she wouldn’t even speak. Then she told me something that made no sense at first. She said you’d asked her to bring Nobu.”