I was positively relieved when the General 
finally arrived-even though he did nothing more, after I had greeted him, than turn on the 
radio and sit drinking a beer. 

After a time he went downstairs to take a bath. When he returned to the room, he took off his 
robe at once and walked around completely naked toweling his hair, with his little round belly 
protruding below his chest and a great patch of hair beneath it. I had never seen a man naked 
before, and I found the General's sagging bottom almost comical. But when he faced me I 
must admit my eyes went straight to where . . . well, to where his "eel" ought to have been. 
Something was flapping around there, but only when the General lay on his back and told me 
to take off my clothes did it begin to surface. He was such a strange little nugget of a man, 
but completely unabashed about telling me what to do. I'd been afraid I'd have to find some 
way of pleasing him, but as it turned out, all I had to do was follow orders. In the three years 
since my mizuage, I'd forgotten the sheer terror I'd felt when the Doctor finally lowered 
himself onto me. I remembered it now, but the strange thing was that I didn't feel terror so 
much as a kind of vague queasiness. The General left the radio on-and the lights as well, as 
if he wanted to be sure I saw the drabness of the room clearly, right down to the water stain 
on the ceiling. 

As the months passed, this queasiness went away, and my encounters with the General 
became nothing more than an unpleasant twice-weekly routine. Sometimes I wondered what 
it might be like with the Chairman; and to tell the truth, I was a bit afraid it might be 
distasteful, just as with the Doctor and the General. Then something happened to make me 
see things differently. Around this time a man named Yasuda Akira, who'd been in all the 
magazines because of the success of a new kind of bicycle light he'd designed, began 
coming to Gion regularly. He wasn't welcome at the Ichiriki yet and probably couldn't have 
afforded it in any case, but he spent three or four evenings a week at a little teahouse called 
Tatematsu, in the Tominaga-cho section of Gion, not far from our okiya. I first met him at a 
banquet one night during the spring of 1939, when I was nineteen years old. He was so 
much younger than the men around him-probably no more than thirty-that I noticed him the 
moment I came into the room. He had the same sort of dignity as the Chairman. I found him 
very attractive sitting there with his shirtsleeves rolled up and his jacket behind him on the 
mats. For a moment I watched an old man nearby, who raised up his chopsticks with a little 
piece of braised tofu and his mouth already as wide as it would go; this gave me the 
impression of a door being slid open so that a turtle could march slowly through. By contrast 


it made me almost weak to see the way Yasuda-san, with his graceful, sculpted arm, put a 
bite of braised beef into his mouth with his lips parted sensuously. 

I made my way around the circle of men, and when I came to him and introduced myself, he 
said, "I hope you'll forgive me." 

"Forgive you? Why, what have you done?" I asked him. 

"I've been very rude," he replied. "I haven't been able to take my eyes off you all evening." 

On impulse I reached into my obi for the brocade card holder I kept there, and discreetly 
removed one card, which I passed to him. Geisha always carry name cards with them just as 
businessmen carry business cards. Mine was very small, half the size of an ordinary calling 
card, printed on heavy rice paper with only the words "Gion" and "Sayuri" written on it in 
calligraphy. It was spring, so I was carrying cards decorated with a colorful spray of plum 
blossoms in the background. Yasuda admired it for a moment before putting it into his shirt 
pocket. I had the feeling no words we spoke could be as eloquent as this simple interaction, 
so I bowed to him and went on to the next man. 

From that day Yasuda-san began asking me to the Tatematsu Teahouse every week to 
entertain him. I was never able to go as often as he wanted me. But about three months after 
we first met, he brought me a kimono one afternoon as a gift. I felt very flattered, even 
though in truth it wasn't a sophisticated robe-woven with a poor quality silk in somewhat 
garish colors, and with a commonplace design of flowers and butterflies. He wanted me to 
wear it for him one evening soon, and I promised him I would. But when I returned to the 
okiya with it that night, Mother saw me carrying the package up the stairs and took it away 
from me to have a look. She sneered when she saw the robe, and said she wouldn't have me 
seen in anything so unattractive. The very next day, she sold it. 

When I found out what she'd done, I said to her as boldly as I dared that the robe had been 
given to me as a gift, not to the okiya, and that it wasn't right for her to have sold it. 

"Certainly it was your robe," she said. "But you are the daughter of the okiya. What belongs 
to the okiya belongs to you, and the other way around as well." 

I was so angry at Mother after this that I couldn't even bring myself to look at her. As for 
Yasuda-san, who'd wanted to see the robe on me, I told him that because of its colors and its 
butterfly motif, I could wear it only very early in the spring, and since it was now already 
summer, nearly a year would have to pass before he could see me in it. He didn't seem too 
upset to hear this. 

"What is a year?" he said, looking at me with penetrating eyes. "I'd wait a good deal longer, 
depending on what I was waiting for." 

We were alone in the room, and Yasuda-san put his beer glass down on the table in a way 
that made me blush. He reached out for my hand, and I gave it to him expecting that he 
wanted to hold it a long moment in both of his before letting it go again. But to my surprise he 
brought it quickly to his lips and began kissing the inside of my wrist quite passionately, in a 
way I could feel as far down as my knees. I think of myself as an obedient woman; up until 
this time I'd generally done the things told to me by Mother, or Mameha, or even Hatsumomo when I'd had no other choice; but I felt such a combination of anger at Mother and 
longing for Yasuda-san that I made up my mind right then to do the very thing Mother had 
ordered me most explicitly not to do. I asked him to meet me in that very teahouse at 
midnight, and I left him there alone. 


Just before midnight I came back and spoke to a young maid. I promised her an indecent 
sum of money if she would see to it that no one disturbed Yasuda-san and me in one of the 
upstairs rooms for half an hour. I was already there, waiting in the dark, when the maid slid 
open the door and Yasuda-san stepped inside. He dropped his fedora onto the mats and 
pulled me to my feet even before the door was closed. To press my body against his felt so 
satisfying, like a meal after a long spell of hunger. No matter how hard he pressed himself 
against me, I pressed back harder. Somehow I wasn't shocked to see how expertly his hands 
slipped through the seams in my clothing to find my skin. I won't pretend I experienced none 
of the clumsy moments I was accustomed to with the General, but I certainly didn't notice 
them in the same way. My encounters with the General reminded me of a time as a child 
when I'd struggled to climb a tree and pluck away a certain leaf at the top. It was all a matter 
of careful movements, bearing the discomfort until I finally reached my goal. But with 
Yasuda-san I felt like a child running freely down a hill. Sometime later when we lay 
exhausted upon the mats together, I moved his shirttail aside and put my hand on his 
stomach to feel his breathing. I had never in my life been so close to another human being 
before, though we hadn't spoken a word. 

It was only then that I understood: it was one thing to lie still on the futon for the Doctor or the 
General. It would be something quite different with the Chairman. 

Many a geisha's day-to-day life has changed dramatically after taking a danna; but in my 
case, I could hardly see any change at all. I still made the rounds of Gion at night just as I 
had over the past few years. From time to time during the afternoons I went on excursions, 
including some very peculiar ones, such as accompanying a man on a visit to his brother in 
the hospital. But as for the changes I'd expected-the prominent dance recitals paid for by my 
danna, lavish gifts provided by 

him, even a day or two of paid leisure time-well, none of these things happened. It was just 
as Mother had said. Military men didn't take care of a geisha the way a businessman or an 
aristocrat did. 

The General may have brought about very little change in my life, but it was certainly true 
that his alliance with the okiya was invaluable, at least from Mother's point of view. He 
covered many of my expenses just as a danna usually does-including the cost of my lessons, 
my annual registration fee, my medical expenses, and . . . oh, I don't even know what else-
my socks, probably. But more important, his new position as director of military procurement 
was everything Mameha had suggested, so that he was able to do things for us no other 
danna could have done. For example, Auntie grew ill during March of 1939. We were terribly 
worried about her, and the doctors were of no .help; but after a telephone call to the General, 
an important doctor from the military hospital in the Kamigyo Ward called on us and provided 
Auntie with a packet of medicine that cured her. So although the General may not have sent 
me to Tokyo for dance recitals, or presented me with precious gems, no one could suggest 
our okiya didn't do well by him. He sent regular deliveries