A young female journalist, Keiko Mitani (Komaki Kurihara), is researching an article on the history of Japanese women who were sex slaves in Asian brothels during the early 20th century.

She locates Osaki (Kinuyo Tanaka), an elderly woman who lives with a number of cats in a shack in a remote village.

A young Osaki (Yoko Takashi) is sold by her poverty-stricken family into indentured servitude as a maid in Sandakan, British North Borneo (today’s Sabah, Malaysia), at what she believes to be a hotel.

The book focused on the "karayuki-san", the Japanese term for young women who were forced into sexual slavery (see sex trafficking) in Pacific Rim countries and colonies during the early 20th century.

Yamazaki’s book was a best-seller and won the Oya Soichi Prize for Non-Fiction Literature; she quickly followed up with a sequel, The Graves of Sandakan.

8 was nominated for the 1975 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but it lost to another production directed by a Japanese filmmaker: Akira Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala, which was the Soviet Union entry for the Oscar competition.

Roger Ebert, in a review published in the Chicago Sun-Times, noted the film’s "material is sensitively handled...the movie is not explicit.

"[5] But Janet Maslin, in a review for The New York Times, called it a "film about prostitution, narrated from what is supposed to be a feminist point of view.

It was one of the highest-grossing Japanese films at the Chinese box office at the time, along with Kimi yo Fundo no Kawa o Watare (Manhunt).