The story begins with a former geisha, Sayuri, recalling her childhood in a small Japanese fishing town called Yoroido. People may like to imagine that she came from a family of geishas, but the reality is that she grew up in a modest environment with her parents and sister.

As a child, the narrator is called Chiyo and lives in a house near a cliff, which she dubs the “tipsy house” because it seems to lean away from the harsh ocean breeze. She describes her life as similarly lopsided. Notably, she takes after her mother, and they both have translucent grey eyes rather than the more common dark brown.

The narrator explains, “My mother always said she'd married my father because she had too much water in her personality and he had too much wood in his” (3). Her father is a practical, methodical man who is most at ease at sea; hence his job as a fisherman. She had once asked him why he was so old, and he showed her the graves of his former wife and children.

Because of their combination of water and wood, it seemed likely that the narrator’s parents would have produced children who possessed a balance of these elements.