Two infant girls are delivered at the very same hospital—one into a wealthy aristocratic family, the other into a squalid household scraping by in the city's slums. But the attending nurse, Michiko, secretly swaps the newborns out of a deep-seated personal vendetta, forever altering the course of both their lives. Years later, the fates of the two young women remain bound together: Miki, raised in affluence, cruelly mistreats Nozomi, who has grown up in poverty. Yet despite their vastly different circumstances, both girls harbor the same aspiration—to become a singer.