Memoirs of a Geisha recap

A poor fisherman's daughter, Chiyo, is sold as a child and taken to a geisha house in the Gion district of Kyoto, where the jealous star geisha Hatsumomo torments her. Demoted to a servant after a failed escape, Chiyo is shown a small kindness by a businessman known as the Chairman and resolves to become a geisha to reach his world. A rival of Hatsumomo, the renowned geisha Mameha, adopts Chiyo as her pupil and renames her Sayuri. Sayuri rises to prominence, her virginity ceremony bringing a record price, and she gains the loyalty of the Chairman's scarred partner, Nobu, while secretly loving the Chairman himself. The Second World War scatters Gion, and Sayuri survives the years in the countryside. After the war she schemes to escape becoming Nobu's mistress so that she can be with the man she has always wanted. The Chairman finally reveals that he has known and quietly guided her all along, and he becomes her patron. She later settles in New York, telling her story from there.

Chiyo Sakamoto is a young girl from the poor fishing village of Yoroido, remarkable for her striking gray-blue eyes. When her mother is dying and her family cannot keep them, she and her older sister Satsu are sold to a man who takes them to Kyoto. There they are separated: Chiyo is placed in an okiya, a geisha house, in the Gion pleasure district, while Satsu is sent to a much lower establishment. In the okiya, Chiyo is put to work as a maid under the household's shrewd Mother, its plain and practical Auntie, and its sour old Granny. She befriends another young girl, Pumpkin, but falls at once under the cruelty of Hatsumomo, the beautiful, jealous geisha whose earnings support the house and who is determined to keep any future rival from rising beside her.

Miserable and desperate to find her sister, Chiyo attempts to run away, but the escape fails; Satsu flees on alone, and the two are lost to each other. Punished and burdened with debt, Chiyo is reduced to a servant with little hope of ever becoming a geisha. At her lowest, she is noticed weeping beside a canal by a gentle, prosperous man known as the Chairman, who offers her a small kindness that she never forgets. His warmth gives her a purpose: to become a geisha and enter the world where he moves. Her fortunes turn when Mameha, one of Gion's most celebrated geisha and a rival of Hatsumomo, offers to take Chiyo on as her little sister and pupil, beginning her long, exacting training in the arts of a geisha.

Under Mameha's guidance, Chiyo is trained and formally reborn as the apprentice geisha Sayuri, making her debut in Gion. Mameha maneuvers her toward prominent patrons while Hatsumomo works spitefully to ruin her at every turn, using her own pupil Pumpkin as a weapon in the rivalry. Sayuri's beauty and her unusual eyes draw attention, and when she comes of age her coming-of-age ceremony is bid up to a record sum, guided by Mameha's careful management of admirers such as the exacting Dr. Crab. Sayuri establishes herself as a rising geisha, all the while nursing her secret love for the Chairman and beginning to attract the steady, honest attention of his blunt and scarred business partner, Nobu.

Sayuri grows into one of Gion's sought-after geisha. Her rivalry with Hatsumomo finally ends when the older geisha's temper and self-destruction bring about her downfall and departure from the okiya, and Sayuri's standing in the house is secured. Nobu remains her most devoted patron and protector, generous and demanding of her loyalty, though it is still the Chairman whom she loves. Then the wider world intrudes: the Second World War descends on Japan, and the pleasure districts, with their silks and banquets, can no longer go on. Gion is closed down, its geisha dispersed, and Sayuri must leave the only life she has built and find refuge and plain work far from Kyoto as the country is swept into hardship.

Sayuri survives the war years in the countryside, sheltered and set to humble labor while Gion stands shuttered. When the war ends and life slowly resumes, she is brought back to help revive her old world. Nobu's company, tied to the Chairman's, is struggling, and Nobu seeks the favor and investment of an important, unrefined official whom Sayuri is asked to entertain and win over. Nobu's devotion has by now hardened into an expectation that Sayuri will become his mistress, a fate she dreads because her heart still belongs to the Chairman. Trapped between gratitude to Nobu and her own longing, Sayuri begins to plot a way to free herself from Nobu's claim without appearing to betray him.

To make Nobu abandon his hopes, Sayuri arranges to be discovered in a compromising moment with the coarse official, calculating that Nobu's disgust will end his interest in her. The plan miscarries when Pumpkin, nursing old resentment, brings the Chairman to witness the scene instead of Nobu, seemingly ruining everything. Yet the truth finally emerges. The Chairman reveals that he had recognized Sayuri years earlier as the child he once comforted by the canal, and that it was he who secretly arranged for Mameha to take her in and raise her, holding back his own feelings out of loyalty to his friend Nobu. With Nobu's claim now released, the Chairman becomes Sayuri's patron and the great love of her life. In later years she leaves Japan for New York, where she opens a teahouse and lives out her days, recounting the whole of her story.

Sayuri's long devotion to the Chairman is at last rewarded, though not as she plans. To avoid becoming the mistress of Nobu, who loves her, she arranges to be discovered in a compromising situation with a coarse official so that Nobu will lose interest. The scheme goes wrong when it is the Chairman, not Nobu, who is brought to witness it, brought there by the jealous Pumpkin in an act of betrayal. Yet the truth comes out: the Chairman confesses that he recognized Sayuri long ago as the weeping girl he once comforted, and that it was he who quietly sent Mameha to raise her, watching over her career from a distance for years while leaving her to Nobu out of loyalty to his friend. With Nobu's claim now ended, the Chairman becomes Sayuri's patron and the love of her life. In her later years she leaves Japan and settles in New York, where she opens a small teahouse and lives comfortably, looking back on the vanished world of Gion that made her and telling her whole story to be set down.