Sayo Masuda's story is an extraordinary portrait of rural life in Japan and an illuminating contrast to the fictionalised lives of glamorous geishas.

At the age of six Masuda's poverty-stricken family sent her to work as a nursemaid
At the age of twelve, she was indentured to a geisha house. In Autobiography of
Geisha, Masuda chronicles a harsh world in which young women faced the realities
of sex for sale and were deprived of their freedom and identity. She also tells of
her life after leaving the geisha house, painting a vivid panorama of the grinding
poverty of rural life in wartime Japan.
Many years later Masuda decided to tell her story. Although she could barely rea