When yuppie Korean-American lawyer Peter brings beauteous bride Sookhy home to suburban New Jersey, she seems withdrawn, English-challenged and easily bullied by her mother-in-law. But fate abruptly takes Peter out of the picture, leaving a curiously unperturbed Sookhy (who's descended from a line of female shamans) free to force her company on the glamorous Caucasian couple next door.

In the years before World War II, a penniless Japanese child is torn from her family to work as a maid in a geisha house.