Young Chiyo lives with her family in a “tipsy” house along the Japanese coast. As her mother’s illness progresses and her father is unable to care for his daughters, the girls are sold to a businessman from a nearby village. They end up in the city of Kyoto, bound for very different paths. Nine-year-old Chiyo, with her startling blue-gray eyes, is to be trained as geisha, while her older sister is sent to a brothel.
Chiyo quickly makes an enemy of the geisha in her okiya, Hatsumomo. While Hatsumomo seeks to torment her, Chiyo finds comfort in thinking of The Chairman, one of the few people who has shown her kindness in life. Such kindness makes Chiyo determined to make something of herself, but with the Great Depression and later World War II looming, she faces an uphill battle.
503 pages.
