Yes, she was mean, yes she was hot tempered but I pitied her. She likely didnt choose to be a geisha and was striking out at the hand fate had dealt her. Never able to be with the person of her choice. Never able to do and feel like her choices and wants mattered.
And then, after the incident with the okiya(dont wanna spoil it) and that shot of her walking away, wow.
Renee
Lestatic #15
My very randomness astounds people!
Having grown up with an alcoholic, I feel like I have a certain perspective on this.
You can see classic behaviors in her character,such as the mood swings, aggression,paranoia etc,.
Between that and living an unhappy life (at least one she was unhappy with), she was always going to implode. This also fueled her drinking I suspect.
If you think of alcoholism as a genetic disorder, it's even more sad. She was pretty much always around alcohol and tempted and encouraged to drink, so she never stood a chance at getting it under control. She literally couldn't get away from it.
If you haven't lived through it, it's hard to understand how years of heavy drinking will change a personality over time.
I think even Sayuri realized that if things were different, she could have ended up like Hatsumomo and that they did have a lot in common. I think you are supposed to pity her at least a little.
What I never got was this.
I got the impression that Hatsumomo was extra cruel to Sayuri because she was jealous or threatened in a sense. Like even at that age she knew that Chiyo could one day be a threat to her place in the order of things. After all, Hatsumomo was mean to Pumpkin, but in a casual way. Not so much in an "I will destroy you" kind of way. In the book it's very clear, she might be mean and crude at times, but she was absolutely no fool when it came to schemes.
All of that being said, her best course of action would have been to play nice with Chiyo. Why not tell her right away about her sister visiting, give her some money to run away, and just make it look like she stole the money and ran? She would have never been heard from again, just like her sister, and Hatsumomo would have had her way.