How It All Goes Down
- Now that Sayuri has ended up with the Chairman, what else is there to talk about?
- Sayuri says it's now forty years later, and she fills us in on her major life events of the last four decades.
- The Chairman became her danna.
- She no longer works as a geisha, because the Chairman doesn't want her to accidentally cross paths with Nobu.
- So he puts her up in a nice house away from Gion. She can't live with him because he's married. How…romantic?
- She accompanies the Chairman on a few business trips (or should we say bizness trips?) to New York City.
- She gives birth to his illegitimate child and asks the Chairman to relocate her to New York permanently.
- In the city, she opens her own teahouse and lives in the Waldorf Towers.
- Now, forty years later, most geisha are gone from the world, and the Chairman is dead. Mr. Tanaka is dead. Nobu is dead. Her mother is dead. Her father is dead. She never saw her sister again.
- Man, that's a downer.
- But Sayuri believes all these people live on inside her heart, and without them, she wouldn't exist.
- She knows nothing in the world is permanent, and all our sufferings eventually wash away, "just like watery ink on paper" (35.37).
- The end.