Memoirs of a Geisha

In her fateful first encounter with the Chairman, Chiyo suddenly has a flashback to a past incident in which a nephew of the Japanese emperor visited Yoraido, the small village where Chiyo was born and raised: 

Standing so close before him, I could smell the odor of talc on his smooth skin, which made me recall the day when the Emperor Taisho’s nephew had come to our little fishing village. He’d done nothing more than step out of his car and walk to the inlet and back, nodding to the crowds that knelt before him, wearing a Western-style business suit [...] I think we all felt touched by nobility and greatness. Occasionally in life we come upon things we can’t understand because we have never seen anything similar. The Emperor’s nephew certainly struck me that way; and so did the Chairman. 

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When Sayuri boards a train to travel from Kyoto to the Baron's house in Hakone, she suddenly has a flashback to the earlier, fateful voyage that brought her and Satsu to Kyoto: 

All at once I could feel something unpleasant welling up inside me. I’d spent the day keeping it veiled from my awareness, but now I saw in my mind much too clearly the image of myself at another time, standing on another platform, taking another train trip—this one with Mr. Bekku—on the day my sister and I were taken from our home. I’m ashamed to admit how hard I’d worked over the years to keep from thinking about Satsu, and my father and mother, and our tipsy house on the sea cliffs.

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When Hatsumomo's confidence is shaken by Sayuri's newfound status as the head geisha in the Nitta okiya, Mameha decides to push her even further. She and Sayuri follow Hatsumomo from engagement to engagement, just as Hatsumomo once did to Sayuri. When they follow Hatsumomo to a tea party hosted by her long-standing patron, the Kabuki actor Shojiro, Sayuri has a sudden flashback to a childhood incident where a wasp stung her and was then killed by a group of children: 

A wasp had stung me and was struggling to free itself from my skin. I was too busy screaming to think of what to do, but one of the boys pulled the wasp off and held it by the wings upon a rock, where we all gathered to decide exactly how to murder it. I was in great pain because of the wasp, and certainly felt no kindness toward it. But it gave me a terrible sensation of weakness in my chest to know that this tiny struggling creature could do nothing to save itself from the death that was only moments away.

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