A young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. She tells her story many years later from the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Her memoirs conjure up the perfection and the ugliness of life behind rice-paper screens, where young girls learn the arts of geisha - dancing and singing, how to wind the kimono, how to walk and pour tea, and how to beguile the land's most powerful men.

This story is a rare and utterly engaging experience, summoning up a quarter century of Japan's dramatic history, and opening a window into a half-hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation.