People Who Eat Darkness (8 page)

Three groups above all stood out.

The first was the Africans. Black men in Japan fitted into a gaijin category of their own. Even in the center of Tokyo, they still drew stares, and nowhere else in the country was there such a concentration of them as on the four-hundred-yard stretch of Outer Moat East Avenue south of the crossing. Like other ethnic groups, they had a specialized function within the Roppongi machinery: the job of luring male passersby into the strip clubs, hostess bars, and lap-dancing parlors. A smaller clan of primped and spiky-haired Japanese boys catered to the native customer, but the rulers of the street were the Africans, men from Ghana, Nigeria, and Gambia. Many of them had been here for years, plenty spoke good Japanese. There was nothing overtly threatening about them; they smiled warmly as they accosted the male stroller, with one hand amiably placed on his shoulder and the other proffering a lurid flyer. Their patter followed him for several hundred yards, relayed from one tout to the next in a murmured baritone. “Good evening, sir!” it began. “Gentleman’s club, best in Roppongi. Topless bar, sir, lovely ladies. Sexy girls, sir, topless, bottomless. Titty and ass, sir. Titty ass, asstittyass, tittyasstittyasstitty. You com’ up. Just look. Seven thousand yen, look. I give you three thousand yen half hour. Just com’ and look see.”

The police would have loved to arrest and deport these men, but almost all had Japanese wives. Sometimes these marriages were a legal fiction, renewed every year in return for a fixed sum in cash. But they gave the husbands the right to reside and work freely in Japan in whatever job they chose, and there was nothing that the police could do.

The second dominant tribe was the principal draw for much of the male nighttime population of Roppongi: the Roppongi girls, those Japanese women who liked foreign men. Periodically, the skimpiness of their dress and inhibitions made them the object of moral concern on the part of the Japanese media. Their appearance changed with the tides of Tokyo street fashion. In the early 1990s, a long-defunct dance club named Juliana’s Tokyo had given birth to the style known as body-con—tight, revealing “body-conscious” outfits that were displayed to the full on the discotheque’s famous raised dancing podiums. By Lucie and Louise’s time, body-con had given way to the
ganguro
, a radically stylized look that combined deep orange artificially tanned skin, ash-gray dyed hair, white makeup, and white lipstick. Every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, tottering on platform boots of stiltlike height, pairs of these girls converged on Roppongi, resembling hallucinatory, Day-Glo golliwogs. They came on the commuter lines from the suburbs and commuter towns of the outlying prefectures. They spent the evening, and then the night, at clubs and bars with names like Motown, Gaspanic, and the Lexington Queen. At dawn every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, a slightly smaller number of the unlucky ones made the melancholy journey back out of the city and home again on the first connecting train.

Then there was the third group among the street tribes of Roppongi: young Caucasian women, who worked as dancers, strippers, and hostesses. They began to appear on the streets in the middle of the evening, hair shining after their workouts at the fitness center. They wore jeans and T-shirts. Before entering their clubs and bars to dress and make themselves up, they would fuel up for the evening at McDonald’s or KFC or the sushi restaurant on the crossing. They moved purposefully, without the diffidence of tourists, and for all the diversity of their origins—Australian, Kiwi, French, British, Ukrainian—they had something in common, apart from youth and prettiness. Something difficult to define: a set of the mouth or shoulders, suggesting defiance, irritation, even resentment. Unlike the friendly Japanese Roppongi girls, they were unapproachable. Lucie and Louise had come here to join their number.

*   *   *

Louise did, in fact, have a Japanese aunt, the wife of her mother’s younger brother. But Masako lived in south London, not in Tokyo. The suggestion that she was to be the girls’ host in Japan was a fib intended to ease the anxieties of Jane Blackman. Louise’s sister, Emma, still had friends living in Tokyo and it was through one of them, a Scottish girl named Christabel, that the room had been booked in Sasaki House. The railway journey from the airport was complicated and trying, requiring repeated changes and steep flights of stairs. Their suitcases were dead weights in their hands, their high heels were painfully impractical, and they were sore and sweating when they hauled their belongings out of the stingingly expensive taxi that carried them on the final leg to their new home.

They had expected to arrive at a simple hostel, with crisply laundered bedding and an obliging manageress. Instead they found themselves in the category of Japanese accommodation known as the gaijin house—a guesthouse of single rooms, rented by Tokyo’s transient foreign population of backpackers, English teachers, street vendors, and night workers. Dying potted plants and bicycles were propped against its outside walls. Huge black crows perched on the cat’s cradle of utility wires overhead. “It was disgusting,” Louise remembered. “We were just in shock. We looked in the lounge, and there were two people stoned on the sofa. We came up to the room and Christa was in there doing her hair. She was putting this thick, gloopy oil all over it—it looked like fat. And they were all smoking spliffs. The room stank. You could hardly see inside with the smoke.”

The window of the tiny room was curtainless; Lucie and Louise had to drape it with sarongs to keep out the morning sun. Not that there was a great deal of light to exclude; the only view was that of the cement wall of the neighboring building. The futon mattresses were sheetless, the mirror was cracked, and the squat toilet in the bathroom was unspeakable. Transforming the “shithouse” into a livable space—with posters, postcards, candles, drapes—was the achievement of their first week in Tokyo. It was by far the pokiest place in which either of them had ever lived.

They slept for much of the next day, stunned by heat and jet lag. That evening, a Friday, they rode into Roppongi on borrowed bicycles with the half-formed ambition of finding jobs. Christa, who worked as a hostess herself, had given them the names of several clubs, but they were still finding their bearings when a good-looking young Japanese man approached and politely asked if he could be of assistance. Were Lucie and Louise looking for work? he asked. Were they interested in working as hostesses? If they came with him, he said, he could introduce them to people who might be able to help.

Warily, they followed the man up Outer Moat East Avenue and into one of the buildings with the neon-lit signboards. The first club had no vacancies, but at the second they were greeted warmly. The young guide was obviously well known to its manager, a gloomy man named Mr. Nishi. He looked them over, asked them a few rudimentary questions—age, nationality, where they were staying—and offered them jobs on the spot. Within days of arriving in Japan, Lucie and Louise were working as hostesses in a small Roppongi nightclub with the name of Casablanca.

5. GEISHA GIRL! (JOKE)

Unless you knew exactly what you were looking for, you could have passed by a thousand times and never cast a second glance at Club Casablanca. The building in which it nestled was brown and anonymous; from the street the only token of its existence was the long vertical signboard, where it was crowded out by the names of more exotic and intriguing establishments. There was Raki Raki, and the Gay Arts Stage, and Seventh Heaven, one of Tokyo’s biggest strip clubs, whose lurid neon dominated the front of the building. Casablanca was on the sixth floor. The elevator opened to face a heavy-looking door plumply upholstered in padded leather and with a brassy plaque bearing the club’s name.

Beyond it was a dimly lit room, perhaps twenty feet by sixty. To the left, rows of bottles glinted behind a low bar. To the right was an electric keyboard on a raised stand and the screen and speakers of a karaoke system. Around the walls were couches and armchairs in pale blue and twelve low tables. Framed prints or paintings were indistinctly visible on the walls.

An Asian man of indeterminate age and nationality guided the customer to one of the tables, on which stood a complicated glass siphon that dispensed water through a pump. A bucket of ice, metal tongs, and a chunky decanter of whiskey were brought—tools and ingredients for the blending of
mizuwari
, the whiskey-and-water mix that is the staple drink of the older salaryman. Despite the pompous details—the leather door, the black bow ties worn by the waiters and barman—it was a space wholly lacking in glamour. The whiskey in the decanter was cheap and sickly; the electric keyboard was crude and blurting; the water siphon, which tried so hard to be impressive, was merely baffling. The club strove for an effect of languid luxury, but the atmosphere was more cozy than sophisticated, with a droopy pretension suggesting the second-class lounge of one of the cheaper cruise liners, or a failing Las Vegas casino, or middle-class suburban England in the 1970s. You half expected the waiter to appear with a plate of pineapple chunks impaled on cocktail sticks with cubes of cheddar cheese.

But this was a Japanese establishment, and to a certain Japanese eye it had a crepuscular allure. The reasons for this were seated at the two tables closest to the bar: a group of foreign hostesses, most, but not all of them, Caucasian. “It was a rather dark place and I had a strange feeling about it,” said Hajime Imura, a publisher who visited Casablanca a couple of times when Lucie worked there. “It had a kind of mysterious atmosphere, suspicious. There were girls of different colors of skin, perhaps Israeli or something. The room was dark, shades of black and blue. Dark chairs and tables. A Filipino singer, very loud. A middle-aged man who seemed to be the manager, a few waiters, maybe Filipino—Asian faces. About ten girls.”

When the customer was comfortably settled with his mizuwari, the manager would signal to the table of foreign girls. Two of them would detach themselves and walk over, and hostessing would commence.

*   *   *

What
was
a hostess exactly? To Western ears the word sounded laughably seedy and euphemistic, scarcely more respectable than “escort”—redolent of cheap perfume and dingy basements in Soho or Times Square. “We just freaked when we heard,” said Sam Burman, who had a phone call from Lucie a few days after her arrival. “What did she mean, ‘hostessing’? She seemed a bit nervous about telling me over the phone. I think she felt embarrassed because she’d told us one thing, and it hadn’t worked out like that, and we were going to worry about her. The last thing she wanted any of us to do was to worry.”

Sophie had the impression that the work involved “inane and dull conversations that she would have to smile at and laugh at. It wasn’t like people sat there saying, ‘Show us your tits’ and ‘How much d’you charge?’ It’s very different from that.” Afterwards, when the question of what hostesses
really
did was a subject of discussion in British tabloid newspapers, Sophie came up with a way of explaining it to skeptical journalists. “The only difference between being a British Airways hostess and being at Casablanca,” she said, “was the altitude.”

Months later, Tim Blackman would receive a long and emotional letter from a kindly old gentleman named Ichiro Watanabe, a loyal customer at Casablanca, expressing his concern over Lucie’s disappearance. “The club is far from the irresponsible reports by mass media aimed at vulgar gossips and based on groundless conjectures,” he wrote in painstaking italic. “The ladie’s [
sic
] job there is just only lighting customer’s cigarette, making whisky and water for him, singing karaoke together and keeping company in talking. That’s all, nothing else, just like she told her mother, ‘a kind of waitressing.’” He added, “I’ve no mind to put in a good word for me. I dare want to say this fact
for her honor
!”

All of this, as far as it went, was true.

The club opened at nine. A little before then, in a narrow dressing room at the back, a dozen, and sometimes as many as fifteen, girls put on makeup and changed from jeans and T-shirts into dresses. They came from all over the world, although in the summer of 2000 there was a proportionately large British contingent. Apart from Lucie and Louise, there was Mandy from Lancashire and Helen from London, as well as Samantha from Australia, Hanna from Sweden, American Shannon, and Romanian Olivia. Three men worked in the club: Tetsuo Nishi, the manager, a pockmarked man in his fifties; Caz, the Japanese barman; and a Filipino singer whose name no one could remember. It was Caz and Nishi who decided which girls would sit with which customers, who rotated them strategically among the tables, and who gave them perfunctory instruction in the duties of a hostess. Much of this consisted of prohibitions: do not allow a customer to refill his own whiskey glass or light his own cigarette. But once seated, the only real task was to talk.

This wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Few of the hostesses could say much more than “yes, thank you” and “excuse me” in Japanese, and although a customer would be unlikely to patronize Casablanca if he spoke no English, fluency and confidence varied widely. For some, a few hours with a foreign hostess was a kind of language lesson in itself. Certain men even took notes, and unselfconscious conversation, of the kind that one would naturally strike up with a stranger, was usually out of the question. And the customer, being a customer, could never be argued with, contradicted, or deserted. The novelist Mo Hayder worked as a hostess and compared it to “having to be nice to a work colleague in whom you’re not too interested.” “I’d ask where they worked, why they were in Tokyo. I’d flatter them and say, ‘I like your tie.’ The number of ties I’ve really loved!”

“You’d just talk rubbish to them,” said Helen Dove, who worked in Casablanca at the same time as Lucie and Louise. “‘How was
your
day today?’ Or try to flatter their egos. ‘You’re such a good-looking man—sing to me.’ They’d tell you how beautiful you were. You’d talk about England, about a business trip he had made to London. Within a few weeks I was starting to hate it. It was so boring, draining. The same conversations night after night, boring conversations with people you don’t care about. Some girls were good, really friendly. I struggled with conversation. It was obviously completely fake. It didn’t help that I couldn’t sing, because there was a lot of karaoke and you had to be so enthusiastic about it, singing duets.”