The protagonist is Sayuri--one of Japan's most celebrated geisha, a woman who is both performer and courtesan, slave and goddess. We follow Sayuri from her childhood in an impoverished fishing village, where in 1929 at the age of nine, she is sold to a representative of a geisha house, who is drawn by the child's unusual blue-grey eyes. From there she is taken to Gion, the pleasure district of Kyoto. But As World War II erupts and the geisha houses must close, Sayuri reinvents herself again to find a rare kind of freedom on her own terms.