Geisha, Interrupted

Take Back the Bar

First of all, I have to say that this was all Jero`s doing.

If Jade and I hadn`t gotten to bickering about which one of us was Jero`s biggest fan and who was more suited to become his groupie, we would have never gotten the idea to go to karaoke and sing that Jero song.  And Jade would not have stopped in her tracks as she remembered that she had the keys to the hostess bar where she works.  The establishment is closed on Saturdays, which essentially meant that we could sneak into the club and use the karaoke machine for free.

Sweeeet.

First we sang some Enka, which got old pretty quickly, leaving me with a new appreciation for how hard that genre is to sing.  So Enka turned to a J-pop theme, which eventually gave way to a nostalgic festival of 90`s music.  Then, at some point between Metallica and Aerosmith, Jade took one of my old hostess dresses out of the closet.  We`ve always called it "the mermaid dress," because it looks like something that a mermaid would wear.  First it belonged to Jade, then I wore it so often that she gave it to me, but it eventually bounced back to her when I quit the bars for good.  Since I often complain about not having any occasions to dress up anymore (seeing as I`m not the party girl I used to be), she suggested I put it on again- with a pair of her friend`s heels, for old times sake.  Needless to say, I am always game for playing dress-up.

If all this weren`t enough, Jade felt the sudden need a photo shoot as well.  At risk of coming across as even more self-absorbed than usual, here some highlights:

 

  

 

And they say drunks have all the fun.  Like my socks?

 

Meanwhile, at the other end of the club, Jade was studying up on how it feels to sing Karaoke in Japanese while lying down across the seats of an empty hostess bar, reading the monitor upside down.  

 

In a notable contrast to her regular role at the club, she seemed quite relaxed.

We ended up losing track of time and staying for hours later than we`d intended.  Let it be known that your average Roppongi hostess bar, when you take away all of the customers, is actually quite an idyllic place.

Thanks Jero!

At Long Last, The Heaven Reunion Part 3

That Sunday afternoon over a month ago, I sat eating Thai food in Ginza, with Jade, Mari and Isabelle.  We chatted away like four women who hadn`t been reunited since our club closed down, some two years earlier.

There was plenty of fodder for small talk: I was getting married in just weeks and Jade was going to be my maid of honor.  We were already packing for New York.  Isabelle, like me, had retired from hostessing and settled for a more stable though far less exciting day job in a Japanese company.  Mari had been out of the night work scene for a year, during which time she`d established an mini-empire which may or may not involve the abundant import and export of Hello Kitty merchandise. 

Ginza Mamas are certainly the resourceful types, even when they are not Ginza Mamas anymore.  It may as well have been written on Mari`s face, which appeared softer and more gentle than its ever been, that she was no longer a night worker.  I far preferred the present countenance to the tight, suspicious and all-knowing expression that`s required of any Ginza Mama.

I was contemplating as much when, without warning, the conversation veered out of control, toward my least favorite topic in all the world.

"How`s your book coming along?" Isabelle asked me, right in front of Mari. 

Crash.

"Umm...ah...Book?"  To lessen the impact, I harnessed an old skill that I picked up long ago on the hostess circuit: feigning complete retardation. "Who told you about a book?"  I asked her, wide-eyed and dumb.

Isabelle nodded toward Jade.  I turned to Jade as well, glaring, panicked.  Jade  elbowed me under the table, hard, a silent reminder that acting retarded will only work on men.

"It`s not that big of a deal," Jade raised her eyebrows and said through her teeth.

"Fine," I glared back. 

After some awkward pauses I somehow managed to take my book out of hiding and pass it around the table.

My fears were unmerited. Isabelle and Mari seemed honestly and genuinely proud of me, for getting my memoir published.  And they were impressed.  Hostesses, after all, are not usually the type to get off their pampered asses and write a book about all the crazy shit they`ve seen in this city after dark.  (If they did, though, memoirs in general would be a lot more interesting.)

Well, they haven`t read it yet. I noted to myself, qualifying.

"So who`s in your memoir?" Isabelle asked. 

"Everyone!" Exclaimed Jade.  For no sane reason, I wanted to kill my best friend just then.

"There were definitely enough crazy happenings at our bar to write a book," someone added. 

"But only a fraction of them made it into the memoir," I qualified. "It would have been like 1000 pages if I`d included everything."

"Remember when you used to get so drunk and shout how much you loved me?"  Mari asked, putting the past in perspective and laughing.

"Well I`m not drunk anymore," I responded "so I don`t have the confidence to scream..." 

"GOOD!"  Interrupted Jade.

"Shut up!" I snapped affectionately, turning my attention back to Mari. 

"But I do still love you." 

Rest In Peace

I hope you`re in a better place now.

again.

Jade was going to work at the club on Friday night, when she noticed many TV cameras and news reporters surrounding a neighboring bar. The below article is presumably the reason why they all came out. Although this story is far too close for comfort, I will update it further as soon as I figure out what`s going on.

FILIPINO BAR HOSTESS LIKELY VICTIM
Severed body part found in Tokyo condo

A paper bag containing a severed body part believed to be from a Filipino bar hostess was found Thursday night in her high-rise apartment in Minato Ward, police said Friday.

Police guard the entrance to a high-rise condominium on the Odaiba waterfront in Minato Ward, Tokyo, Friday after a woman's body part was found there the previous night.

The bag contained a 30-sq.-cm piece of human flesh believed to have come from the woman's waist, which was apparently severed by a knife. A blood-soaked futon was found in the kitchen, they said.

The unit, on the 26th floor of a building near the Odaiba waterfront, is shared by a Japanese man and several Filipino women who work at the same bar in the Roppongi district, according to police, who are withholding all names at this point.

The man, in his 40s, is believed employed to keep tabs on the hostesses, who may be working at the bar illegally.

One of the women, in her 20s, failed to report to work Thursday night, so another woman, 20, went to look for her.

When she returned home she encountered the man carrying a severed body part and fled to a nearby police box to report the incident at around 9:55 p.m., police said.

But the man was gone by the time police arrived at the flat.

Police said they suspect the severed body part belongs to the missing hostess and are searching for the man, but have so far been unable to locate him.

The presumed victim was asleep when the other hostesses left the condo at around 8 a.m. Thursday.

A male employee at the Roppongi bar said, "She never failed to call whenever she took a day off, but she didn't (phone) on April 3."

The Heaven Reunion: Part 2

Jade and I met up in Ginza early last Sunday. I'd just received my first hardcover copy of my book from my publisher, and I wanted to show Jade before we were scheduled to meet Mari and Isabelle.  And if I could muster enough courage, I'd show the book to my other former co-workers at some point during the course of the day.

The mere thought of showing them my book scared me to death.  Yet the other option- hoping that they'd never find out about it- was becoming less and less plausible. 

"The Japanese subtitle is really cool," Jade said, pointing to the cover of the book which read: 夜に咲く花.

"You should know," I assumed she was joking with me "you wrote it."

"I wrote it?" she is not kidding after all, "me?"

"When I first ran the cover art by you last year," I said, "don't you remember?"

Jade had agreed with me that literal translation of "bar flower" (酒場華) looked a bit awkward and suggested I ask them to change it to something that was less literal but might actually make sense to a Japanese person, that is, 夜に咲く花 (yoru ni saku hana): flower that blooms at night.

"Wow," she said, hardly fazed by what she'd forgotten, "I'm so awesome!"

Jade is the first to admit that her memory is highly selective and basically sucks.  I often envy such a memory, as I envision that my life would be far less painful without the recurring and vivid recollections of a past that I'd rather forget.  But at the same time, people need to remember how much the past hurts in order not to repeat it.  Case in point: Jade is still hostessing.

After I put the book away, she and I started to chat about how weird it was going to be to see Mari again after all this time.  I wondered aloud whether we shouldn't be a little frightened.  Jade and I have discussed this woman extensively throughout the course of our bestfriendship, and we both admit that we were scared to death of Mari for at least the first few weeks we were working below her.  Mari seemed to have an off switch, which she used to shut herself off emotionally on most nights of the week.  It was her seemingly frozen countenance that scared us the most during those first weeks.

In that way as well, Mari was the complete antithesis of Destiny.  When Destiny hires you to work for her, she gives you a speech about how she is your 'big sister' now and you can turn to her whenever you have a problem.  And then, slowly but surely, Destiny reveals herself to be the devil incarnate.  On the other hand, it takes some time to realize that Mama Mari's seeming lack of emotion is a survival mechanism in the world of bar hostessing, since she's actually quite warm-hearted at her core. 

First Isabelle arrived, then Mari.  Mari was ravishing as ever, if surprisingly short in her moderately flat shoes.  The Mama Mari in my memory (and in my memoir, consequently) towers over me in her stilettos.  Yet without her heels, Mari is five foot four.

Mari and I embraced.  She gripped my shoulders with her hands and studied my face. 

Lea ga kawaranai ne, she said. Lea, you haven't changed at all.

Among bar girls who are growing older by the minute, this is one of the highest complements you can give someone: you haven't changed at all.  It means that you have not yet begun to wither.

Luckily for me, Mari was wrong.

(to be continued)

The Heaven Reunion: Part 1

When I first received an email from Mama Mari's cell phone, I was suspicious.  Why was she contacting me out of the blue like this?  We hadn't spoken since Heaven closed down, and I'd figured she was back in Manila, engaging in one of her many business ventures.  But most importantly, why would she want to contact me?

"Are you still in Tokyo?" "Where do you live now?"

After responding to this initial set of queries prefaced with the required OMGgoodtohearfromyou, I was hit by a sudden wave of paranoia.  This wasn't Mama Mari at all.  The Mama Mari in all of my viciously painful memories (brought to me courtesy of early sobriety!) would never want to speak to me again.

This was someone else.  Someone who took Mari's phone and found my email address in her list of contacts.  Someone who wanted to know where I lived!  It dawned on me that various "old friends" from the hostess world could be looking for me, and not with the best intentions.  And God, what if "Destiny" was behind this?

Mama Destiny is my mortal enemy, who has probably forgotten all about my existence by now.  I'm sure she's been quite busy ripping apart the hundreds of girls who've worked under her since I stormed out of her club screaming. 

Mama Mari, on the other hand, is the anti-Destiny.  I adored working for her.  She even inspired my memoir (through the course of which my 'black and white thinking' is even more evident.)

As I thought so much to myself, Mari and I exchanged a long series of text messages.

"I'm SO glad u stopped drinking," she wrote.

My paranoia stopped: this was really her.  No other Ginza Mama would dare say something so unprofitable.  Mama Mari was always a bit too human to succeed as a Ginza Mama, and Jade and I speculated that this was one of the reasons that Club Heaven had to shut its doors two years ago.

"You wanna meet up next week," she asked. "I live close by, with my son." 

Of course, with her son.  He would have to be a teenager by now. 

"Ok, can I invite Jade too?"

"Jade is still in Tokyo? Great."

So Mari called up Jade, along with another former hostess named Isabelle.  And within a few days, the date of our "Club Heaven" reunion was set.

I spent the days leading up to the reunion trying to think of the easiest way to tell Mari and Isabelle that since we'd last met, I'd written a memoir about my experiences as a hostess.  About our experiences, more accurately. 

How would one go about breeching such a topic?  By the way Mama, I liked working with you so much that I wrote a book about you.  It's coming out in two weeks.  Hope you don't mind. 

And I'd have to fess up to all this sober, no less.

(to be continued...)

romancing the lifeless

Compared to hostesses, nightclub "hosts" here in Tokyo tend to start work later in the night.  Perhaps it's because hostesses are notorious for hitting up host bars after work, where the women pay to be romanced and catored to by men whom they often choose from a menu. And compared to their female counterparts, hosts usually need to consume a greater quantity of alcohol in order to remain employed.  Their job is to fit a masculine stereotype, after all.  These hosts themselves do not finish work until well past dawn, when the aftereffects of their livelihoods are displayed in plain sight.

On the left of the below snapshot, one such nightclub host is being embraced in the middle of a crowded Kabukicho intersection.  This man retains his lifelessly "cool" posture while his head is slumped over the shoulder of a young woman.  She is either his girlfriend or his customer.  It's hard to guess which, even in the daylight.  A fellow host looks on with an aura of impatience.

When the lights change again, I realize that this man is not actually lost in an emotional embrace.  Instead, he can't move.  He has passed out on her shoulder in the middle of the street, and the light is about to turn green. 

Dude, not cool.  I think so much to myself, looking on as the other host quickly hails a cab and the unconscious man is carried inside of it safely.  Safe until evening at least, when he will start getting paid by the bottle again.

Attack of the Heinously Irrelevant

(Warning: this entry may be too upsetting for those who get especially unnerved by the actions of stupid, sexist fucks.)

They are the type of defense attorneys who eat babies for breakfast.

You know the kind I mean.  And now, as if it weren't enough to get Joji Obara off the hook for the rape and murder of Lucie Blackman (the British bar hostess who was killed here seven years ago), they've now published a lengthy documentary which appears to serve no purpose other than to further tarnish the poor woman's name.

Although the book does not explicitly say that it was put together by Obara's cronies, it was.  Its pages are composed largely of evidence submitted to court by the defense, exhibits which were consequently thrown out by a judge who ultimately deemed them irrelevant.   The book also bears a striking resemblance to a website called The truth of Lucie's case which I know for a fact to be published by "a friend of Obara".

And really, who else would headline a book about a man who has been convicted of serial rape and manslaughter (though he was cleared of all counts relating to Blackman) with what translates to: "THE TRUTH ABOUT LUCIE'S CASE: the struggle of Joji Obara (who has an IQ of 180) vs. an elite prosecution team..."

Basically, this "documentary" is heinously irrelevant.  The evidence it presents has absolutely no bearing on Obara's guilt or innocence (fyi: he's guilty!).  All the while, these pages serve as a disgusting commentary on the conservative end of a society's attitudes towards both women and foreigners.

Take the first few pages, where we are greeted photos of a blond foreign woman inside of Obara's apartment.  She is cutting up and injecting herself with heroin.  She is not Lucie. 

To our author's credit, he admits in fine print that the woman in the opening photos is not the girl the book is supposed to be about. "This is a hostess named T," it reads, "she knew Lucie.  Here she is using heroin. . ."

And yet, it is unlikely that she and Lucie even knew each other at all, as in one of the photos, someone forgot to erase the date in the corner (June 15, 1995).  This is five years before Blackman's murder.

And why is T even relevant again?  Is it because all foreigners look the same? Or maybe because all foreigners do the drugs?  Either is plausible when you eat babies for breakfast...

I don't have time to describe all the contents of the book in detail, so I'll just skip to the part that enrages and saddens me the most: the reprinting of Lucie Blackman's Tokyo diaries as evidence.  I have seen these entries before, on the website I referred to above.

The journal entries are submitted with psychiatric commentary, concluding that Lucie suffered from a manic depressive disorder.  Again, as if it were relevant. 

To me, her journal entries seem pretty normal. 

Below, I have posted exhibits "A" "B" and "C" (A-F are available on the website itself)
of the diaries below.  They were presented to the court by the defense in an effort to paint a picture of the victim as a mentally unstable 'bimbo,' subsequently  thrown out of court, then reprinted in the defense's website and book.

While anyone who is not a complete dolt can easily see that none of this should be evidence in a murder trial, I must remark that instead exhibits A, B and C have everything to do with what working at a Tokyo hostess bar will do to the 21-year-old female psyche.

To be honest, I have read Lucie Blackman's journal entries over and over again throughout the past year or so.  And since getting sober, I have read them with a strong desire to reach into the pages, pull the young woman  out and shake some self-confidence into her.  Then, upon reflection that a good shaking is not likely to work so well, I've wanted to pull her from the pages and just hug her tightly instead.

Yet there are predators in this world, like Obara, who seem to have a sixth sense for finding young women who feel lost, as many of us do, for these are the women who are likely to make the worst decisions with respect to their own safety. 

And he got to her first.

 

hakidame ni tsuru

I noticed something peculiar yesterday around Iidabashi station in Tokyo: there was a lovely white crane, wading in the water of a polluted runoff into the city sewers.

The scene reminds me of a regular customer I once had when I was still a hostess.  "You are like a hakidame ni tsuru," he told me once, in a half-hearted attempt to dissuade me from working nights so often.  Hakidame ni tsuru is a Japanese expression that literally means "a crane in the trash."  Some people may say "a jewel in a dunghill" in English.

I am ambivalent about the comparison.  Though the mizu shobai might be a trash heap of uninhibited vice, the other women I worked with were not trashy in the least.  They did what they had to, sending their earnings home to Manila, Vladivostok or rural China.  They were my friends.  Still, the context in which we met was nothing to brag about.

But either way, there is no need to pity or be too be concerned about that crane who dwells in the trash heap.  She's got wings after all, and will spread them whenever she pleases.

See ya!

The Real Thing

I was cleaning out the files on my hard drive when I came across this photo.  It was taken during the Fall of 2003, inside one of the major geisha "tea houses" that still line streets of the Gion district in Modern Kyoto.  So here we have your modern day geisha party:

 

If my memory serves me correctly, the above clients are in the film industry.  The actor (at the head of the table) and his manager (the very drunk one) are engrossed in that type of male bonding that can only occur when ones drinks are being poured by a living piece of precious artwork (presently fixing her hairpiece).

I am not the slightest bit proud of the particular misadventure of mine that resulted in the taking of this photograph.  Still, I wrote about that night in detail in my book.  Which reminds me, I need to commence looking for a nice hole to crawl into and die of embarrassment when my memoir hits the shelves next year. . .