The document summarizes the hero's journeys of Persephone and Sayuri. Persephone was abducted by Hades to be his wife and queen of the underworld, where she was forced to stay for part of each year after eating pomegranate seeds. Sayuri was sold into a geisha house as a child and faced cruel treatment, but was taken under the wing of a head geisha and trained to become a famous and successful geisha herself, though her world was changed by World War II. Both women underwent transformations through conflicts and hardships in their lives.