People Who Eat Darkness Read online

  The girlfriend of Louise’s new friend arrived, but Louise was oblivious to her fizzing jealousy. “Lou was losing it more & more, kissing the guy in front of her blissfully unaware,” Lucie wrote. Suddenly, the music had been switched off, the lights were up, and everyone in the club was watching a five-way brawl on the dance floor. “The girl went for Lou,” Lucie wrote, “I went for the girl, the guy went for Lou, I went for the guy, the guy went for me, the bouncer went for the guy—eventually I went for the bags, I went back for Lou, we went to the lift, we got stalked by psycho man, & finally we got home.”

  “I never heard from Lucie that she was having a great time,” Sophie said. “I’m sure that she was going out and getting drunk, partying hard—but I don’t think she was happy. I don’t say that because of her fate—I really don’t think she was. I remember being worried that she wasn’t happy.

  “She was like me in that way. We’d … get involved in an act almost. If people around me are getting drunk, I’ll get drunk, and if people around me are reading books in the library, I’ll read books in the library. That’s not to say that I always do what I don’t want to do. But there’s something quite genuine about that need to be accepted. Lucie did thrive on being well loved and popular, and she was. But, as she got older, she got involved in things that weren’t really her.

  “I think Lucie felt quite rejected out in Japan. I certainly got the impression quite early on that she wasn’t having fun and that she was putting on an act—go out, join in, but never really feel content in your skin.”

  * * *

  Lucie was still preoccupied by thoughts of home and the people she had left behind there. At Geronimo one night, the DJ played “Fields of Gold” by Sting, which reminded her of Alex, the young Australian barman in Sevenoaks. “I can’t imagine what it’ll be like finally to clap eyes on him,” she wrote in her diary. “I get a ‘flip’ sensation in my stomach just thinking about it, sometimes it seems like tomorrow, other times it feels like a century away. All I think of is him … holding my hands, looking with his beautiful eyes boring into mine, catching his bottom lip with his teeth … Even at the bar, wasted, surrounded by the company of men, he’s still in my every thought.”

  Money was a worry, as usual. At the end of May, three weeks after arriving in Tokyo, Lucie carried out one of her regular reviews of her finances. Her debts—including two bank loans, a bank overdraft, debts to her mother and father, a credit-card bill, and the balance on the “Princess Bed”—amounted to about $8,000. Minimal payments on all these, plus the rent on Sasaki House, the rental charge for her bicycle, and a modest ¥20,000 (about $188) a week for living expenses used up her entire hostessing income. It was obvious that it would take months to reduce her debts even slightly; her original plan of returning home in early August would have to be abandoned. “There’s nothing I can [do] except deal with it,” she wrote, “but it’s left me with a gutted feeling Alex & I won’t work out and home now seems so much further away. I still feel such a huge sense of disorientation & being lost, yet every time I seem to settle on something—it changes.”

  But there was more bothering Lucie than money and an absent boyfriend. It came out in a passionate, lonely, and probably tipsy diary entry three weeks after arriving in Japan.

  Date: 26/5—5:50AM

  I don’t know what’s wrong but this place seems to be bringing out the absolute worst in me. I can not stop crying. I have such pain in my stomach—a real physical symptom of feeling absolutely crushed. I am so cried out, tears no longer come in one lot, they only come exhaust[ed]ly in waves.

  I’m not coping well here. I can’t pull myself out of this hole I’ve fallen into.

  I’ve had to leave Lou in the Sports Cafe with Keenan—I couldn’t stand it any longer. I feel so fucking horrible there—I hate it.

  I feel so ugly & fat & invisible in there I constantly hate myself. I’m so average. Every single part of me from head to toe is completely average. I must have been kidding myself that I could make it out here. I hate the way I look, I hate my hair, I hate my face, I hate my nose, I hate my slanty eyes, I hate the mole on my face, I hate my teeth, I hate my chin, I hate my profile, I hate my neck, I hate my boobs, I hate my fat hips, I hate my fat stomach, I hate my flabby bum, I HATE my birthmark, I hate my bashed up legs, I feel so disgusting & ugly & average.

  I am so fucking up to my neck in debt & so badly need to do well. This is not a bad thing to do with Lou & I’m really happy for her—but I’m a crap hostess. I’ve had 1 dohan only cos of Shannon, another stood me up—I mean how shit must you be for a dohan to stand you up? I only have [Ken] now—but how long will that last? Louise gets men falling over themselves to request her—I get fake no’s & stood up.

  Nishi gave her a tip & she’s being so fab about it, but she’s just falling so well into it—making heaps of friends & as usual no matter where I am—I feel alone.

  It’s not 7oaks, it’s me.

  I can’t explain this feeling to anyone, this feeling of complete detest for myself & this feeling of being so average. I’ve tried so badly to understand why & to make Mum and Lou understand—but they think I’m being silly—but I really feel like this so much. It’s a feeling of being so invisible, being no-one, feeling like I’m never a part of something & never quite fitting in.

  … I know Lou has been all over the place for the last year, but she never has that feeling of no self worth.

  The most beautiful men become spellbound. She always feels she deserves the best & becoming more radiant and confident all the time. I really am not joking & this sounds stupid but I am so exhausted with feeling this shit & feeling so lonely despite being with Lou every day & feeling so low & so up to my eyeballs with debt—I sometimes really can’t be bothered to wait & find out what happens. I just want to disappear. I feel like I’m reeling & I don’t know what to do.

  I feel so outside.

  I’ve nothing anywhere.

  * * *

  A man named Kai Miyazawa described to me the art of running a hostess club. Kai would have been a striking figure anywhere, and among middle-aged men in Japan he was outstanding. He was in his mid-fifties, with a handsome, lined face and graying hair pulled up high above his forehead and tied in a ponytail. He wore a flower-embroidered shirt unbuttoned a third of the way down the chest and bright orange trousers bound with a striped white and orange belt. There was a silver chain around his neck, on his left wrist another chain and a chunky silver watch, and on his feet a pair of cowboy boots.

  Kai was a living history of foreign hostess bars in Roppongi. In 1969, at the age of eighteen, he had visited the original kimpatsu club, Casanova, and been enraptured by the beauties who worked there. For the next twenty years, he spent most evenings in Roppongi, indulging his fascination. One day a friend remarked that if he loved foreign girls so much, he should set up a place of his own. Club Kai opened in 1992, to be succeeded a year later by Club Cadeau. It was hard work, and Kai struggled to make money. He was constantly having to move to cheaper premises, or landing in trouble with the local yakuza, the Japanese mafia. “Running a business—I don’t know it well,” he said. “What I do know is girls.”

  Kai was proud of Club Cadeau. As its manager, as well as owner, he watched over his hostesses with the concentration of a gambler over a hand of cards. He knew each of their strengths and weaknesses; he deployed them carefully and deliberately, at the moment of optimum moneymaking advantage. To the unobservant customer, quietly becoming sozzled over the course of an evening, the coming and going of different hostesses seemed a natural process, an ebb and flow as of the tides. But Kai controlled everything, like a ponytailed Zeus peering down upon the world from the bar of Mount Olympus.

  He rarely took to the floor of the club himself; only with the very best customers would he sit for a brief exchange of pleasantries. Kai’s job was to monitor the room, tuning in to the invisible frequencies and vibrations that surrounded each grouping of hostess and customer, gauging t
he aura around each man and how it fluctuated over the course of the evening. He had to be aware all the time at what point in the cycle of the “system” each customer had reached and how he might be detained a little while longer. “If a customer stays for just one hour, I make no money,” said Kai. “He pays ten thousand yen. I pay the girls three thousand yen, so, after the rent and the drinks, I’m left with two thousand yen, something like that. If a customer stays for one hour, I don’t care. After one hour—then I care.”

  On entering the club, the customer would be seated with one of the most attractive girls. This was his hostess honeymoon: the welcome was deferential, the girls were beautiful, the whiskey was warm in the belly, and the dimness of the lighting cast a veil of erotic promise over the tawdry surroundings. Girl and customer started to talk. Kai was watching. “First I give him a beautiful girl with a nice character,” he said. “And then I’m checking to see how they get on, have they connected?” If not, then Kai would mutter in the ear of the waiter, who muttered in the ear of girl number one. She politely excused herself, to be replaced immediately by a second hostess. Perhaps this girl would hit it off with the customer. She had to detain him only until the end of the first hour and the beginning of the second. If she succeeded in this, then the first hand had gone to Kai.

  “Past one hour, even one minute, I’ll pick that girl up and move her to another table, and leave him with an ugly girl. If he wants to talk to the pretty one again, he can request her—¥3,000. Or he might say, ‘I want her again,’ and you say, ‘I’m sorry, she’s not available—wait half an hour.’” By that time, the customer would be into his third hour, with a bill of ¥30,000 and rising.

  “You watch them,” Kai said, with the smile of an experienced huntsman recalling the stalking of an elk. “You know what they are thinking. So if he’s going to the toilet and he checks his watch just before he goes in, then you know that he’s planning to leave. So then you give him the best girl in the club. She is waiting for him when he comes out, the girl of his dreams.” She would hand him a hot towel as he closed the toilet door behind him and lead him by the hand back to the table. He would decide to stay for one more round of whiskey and water—but his new girlfriend wanted to drink champagne (at ¥30,000 a bottle). Ticktock, ticktock: soon the fourth hour had begun. In three hours and one minute, the customer had spent close to ¥80,000. And now his champagne dream girl was whisked away.

  “You have to look inside these men,” Kai said. “You have to read their brains inside. I’m a genius at this.”

  Part of his skill was in finding the right girls. Kai sized them up like an expert horse trader. “The girls need to be under twenty-two,” he said. “It’s very important they look nice, like flowers. Inside the club, if only one of the girls is beautiful, all the others look beautiful too. Roppongi is small. If one girl is beautiful, the word spreads, everyone is talking about her, people are lining up. My club at that time had the most beautiful girls, the most fantastic girls. When girls came to Tokyo, they had a list of which club to work in—number one was One Eyed Jack’s, because it’s the biggest. Second was my club, Cadeau. Sometimes I was at the top.” At the peak of business, in the early 1990s, the harvest of girls from the streets of Roppongi was not enough to meet demand. Kai and his British wife, herself a former hostess, placed advertisements abroad and went on scouting trips to Britain, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, France, and Germany to source fresh talent.

  Kai, as he said, knew foreign girls. He loved foreign girls; he made his living from them. And he despised them. The way he expressed his contempt was casual, unimpassioned, offhand. After the enthusiasm with which he talked about running the club, it came as a shock. But it was born of a reciprocal contempt from the hostesses themselves, or Kai’s perception of one—a condescension and indifference that was racist in character.

  “Only ten percent of them are normal girls, girls with an identity who know why they are in Japan,” he said. “Only ten percent of them like Japan, are interested in the country, the culture.” Most of the girls he recruited in Tokyo, he said, were travelers who had found themselves in Thailand, following the backpacker trail, through the druggy tourist islands of the south with their full moon parties and unconstrained supplies of marijuana, Ecstasy, and cocaine. “So they run out of money. Then they hear that in Japan they can make money easily. So they come over, work for three months, and when they have made their money, they go back to Thailand. They don’t like it here. They don’t respect yellow people. They’re just after the money.

  “Ninety percent of them can’t get jobs in their own country. Only ten percent have a reason to be in Japan. They have no idea—they’re just party girls. They take drugs, chase boys. Everyone takes drugs—at the weekend they always take Ecstasy, they party like crazy. The drug culture here is crazy, crazy, crazy. Crazy. Only the East Europeans don’t do it too much, because they send all their money back home to their families.

  “Maybe twenty, thirty percent of them have sexual problems. What does that mean? That means their father fucked them, a lot. They used to tell me about it, because I’m easy to talk to. They say to me, ‘Kai, my father is still my boyfriend.’ Because of that, they’re always angry. Maybe seventy, eighty percent of them are divorced back in their country. This kind of background, this troubled background.

  “They have no friends. They cannot communicate with people. And then they go to Thailand and they can make friends at last because they meet other people like them. The communication is drugs. At weekends, that’s what they share. Maybe ninety percent of them sleep with their customers, you know. Why not? It doesn’t hurt, it feels good, you get money, you get rich—no problem!”

  * * *

  When Kai talked this way, he was expressing his sense of moral superiority, and this was hard to take seriously. I didn’t believe that nine out of ten hostesses prostituted themselves. I didn’t believe the other percentages he bandied around. They were just a pompous way of making the misogynistic generalization: all hostesses are whores. On the other hand, there was no doubt that the women he described—druggy, fucked up, and lost—were present in Roppongi in large numbers, as strippers and also in the hostess clubs. But Kai’s disgust spoke of something else. No man was in a weaker position to pass judgment on hostesses. The fact that he did indicated his own hypocrisy but also suggested something of the general Japanese attitude.

  After spending a little time in Roppongi, one’s eyes became attuned to its spectrum, and it became possible to perceive the differences between a waitress and hostess, stripper and “massage” girl. But to most people, these distinctions were not obvious, and not especially interesting. “Some hostesses don’t consider themselves part of the mizu shōbai because they are not having sexual intercourse,” said Mizuho Fukushima, a female member of Japan’s parliament who campaigned for the rights of foreign women in Japan. “But people outside consider what they are doing part of the sex industry.”

  Anne Allison writes, “There is something dirty about [the hostess], the sexuality she evokes, and the world of the mizu shōbai she represents. All of this sexual dirtiness, in turn, makes the woman who works in this world ineligible for respectable marriage, ineligible therefore to become a respectable mother with legitimate children … in a culture where motherhood is considered ‘natural’ for women, the mizu shōbai woman is constructed as a female who transgresses her nature. For this she is degraded; for this, however, she is also enjoyed.”

  * * *

  Lucie’s low lasted through the end of May and into June. By the second week of the month, her mood lifted a little, and she began to think again of the future. “Really been struggling with these awful emotions,” she wrote. “But feel OK today. Suddenly realise I don’t want to be here until Nov/Dec—I need fresh air, big spaces. I’ve felt this way ever since I arrived.”

  On Friday, the two girls left the club and dropped into Wall Street to meet Louise’s new boyfriend, a Frenchman named Côme (“like at
the end of Lancôme,” she explained to Sam), who had promised to bring along a friend to meet Lucie. The bar was crowded; the men were late. “As they are not there we grab a drink and sit down,” she wrote to Sam, “when MR. SEX GOD OF THE CENTURY STROLLS IN!” Louise, in quick time, “allured him” in their direction. “We start chatting and he is a babe,” Lucie wrote. “His name is Scott and he is twenty, an American from Texas and an accent to melt you, blue eyes, 6 foot 2, huge shoulders, washboard stomach, blond straight brown hair, cute arse, he could get a modeling contract in a flash but actual job—wait for it—he is a US Navy Marine!!! Are you thinking uniform?? I did too!” Already, she was thinking tactically. “I decided just to enjoy the evening for what it was,” she wrote, “and so long as I didn’t pander after him as I’m sure many do, & didn’t sleep with him—or do anything like that I was in a no lose situation. I kept very cool and confident & he was like a bee to a honey pot.”

  They moved on to Roppongi’s oldest disco, Lexington Queen. Champagne was ordered; Lucie and Scott danced. “We got on like a house on fire. He is a fab dancer. And we were just owning the dance floor together and I loved it.” They went to a third bar, named Hideout. By this time the sun was rising in the sky. Côme was helplessly drunk, and Louise decided to see him home. Scott had long before missed the train back to his aircraft carrier, so Lucie made a decision. Still mindful of The Rules, she gave him what she called the “Fuck Off Speech,” and then she invited him home.

  Lucie recorded the Fuck Off Speech on a special page of her diary headed “Quotes!! Tokyo Memories.” It went: “Look, you’re cute. I’m sure loads of girls would sleep with you, but if that’s what you want from me—you’ve picked the wrong girl—so just fuck off now if so.”