It was here that I found myself, one steamy August night, sitting in a darkened strip joint while the police knocked on the door. I went traveling just about as soon as I was able to leave home. It began with a flight to Tokyo, where, aged 19, I spent three months working in a hostess club, then made a loop around the southern hemisphere before returning back to the U.
A few years later, armed with a degree but few prospects for making anything of myself, I returned to a place where I could at least make someone else of myself and earn a pretty good amount of money doing so: Roppongi.
I returned to Tokyo early As I had done seven years earlier during my first stint living there, I found work at a hostess club. All hostesses were required to do was to look pretty, top up drinks, light cigarettes and make conversation with customers.
It was a basic service job dressed up in evening gowns and low lighting. I had enjoyed hostessing the first time around; it was good money and I had liked the artifice of it all, pretending to be a party girl. And it felt just far enough removed from the sex industry to feel safe. Two years after my first trip, however, there had been a murder. An Englishwoman named Lucie Blackman had disappeared while out with a customer beyond the confines of the clubβa platonic date known as a dohan.
The club charges a fee to the customer for taking the hostess outside and the hostess is required to form an artificial relationship with the customers.
