Content Warning: This guide includes discussion of rape of girls and women, child brides, sex, childbirth, miscarriage, abortion, babies dying or being killed, taking children from their mothers, adoption, dead kittens, murder, and blood.

The first act takes place in a restaurant, where Marlene is hosting a dinner to celebrate her promotion to managing director of the Top Girls Employment Agency. Marlene enters first and orders a bottle of wine for herself and her five guests. Her first guest, Isabella Bird, is renowned as an adventurous 19th-century travel writer from Scotland. Isabella congratulates Marlene, who demurs, wishing she could travel like Isabella. Isabella says she found it impossible to stay in one place, but she missed her sister, Hennie, terribly when traveling. Lady Nijo, who lived in Japan in the 13th century, first as a concubine to the emperor and later as a nun and poet, arrives. They drink wine, and Lady Nijo says that she was raised to be the emperor’s concubine, and she cried the first time he had sex with her at age 14. Marlene asks, “Are you saying he raped you?” (3), but Nijo doesn’t see it as rape.