Wednesday, March 1

After dinner, Nagano-san asks Yokota-san to "take David-san for a drink".

"You like to go drinking? Cabaret?"

Yokota-san talks briskly as we walk: "You know cabaret club? What kind of girl do you like? Very young girls? Tall girl? Do you like Japanese girl, Chinese, Filipino?"

"Whatever you like," I respond, then correct myself, "of course Japanese are the most beautiful."

Yokota-san stops to discuss options and prices with seemingly every pimpish character on the streets of Honcho-dori, and has collected a fistful of coupons within two blocks. Finally he stops at a brightly lit chrome-fronted place, a cabaret, and asks a barker out front something that I can't quite hear. Then I hear him ask if a foreigner is OK. There is a small lively dialogue, and Yokota-san is telling the barker that I speak Japanese, including me in the conversation as if to prove the point. "Of course, no problem" I say in Japanese. Finally there is a gesture of assent and we go up the stairs. At the top, however, a tall and tough-looking bouncer is unmoved by Yokota-san's explanations and we are turned away, another blow to international relations.

A few blocks away, toward Kannai station, Yokota-san stops in front of another establishment, this one on the ground floor and intriguingly named "Schoolmates". One glance at the various posters hanging next to the door provides the explanation: the hostesses portrayed in the photos are all dressed up in high school uniforms, complete with conservative sailor-style sweaters, black pumps and the latest youth fashion fad, baggy white cotton leggings.

At the door, Yokota-san asks if he can use a credit card (easier to expense, I suppose) but is told that it is cash only here. We move on.

Around the block we go, up a set of narrow stairs to a third apparently promising place. Yokota-san checks the prices on a reader board out front (one hour for around fifty dollars per person), shakes his head and says "expensive". We go down to the street again.

Yokota-san apparently has a liking for uniforms, because he leads me back to "Schoolmates" and asks, "Is this OK?" He has two discount coupons collected from a street corner huckster a few blocks away, and apparently enough cash to cover us.

I nod.

We go inside. It's a small bar, with room for perhaps twenty people including the hostesses. There are only three other guests in the room, all older men in dark suits, and a total of five hostesses. As advertised on the posters, all the hostesses wear costumes and makeup intended to make them look like rather oversexed high school girls.

We are shown to a table in the rear of the room, next to an inactive karaoke machine. Soon an attractive, young-looking woman comes over to the table and sits down. She asks our names and starts engaging us (Yokota-san, mostly) in insipid conversation... a guessing game, "How old do I look?" followed by harmless questions about our jobs, where we live, what movies do we like, what is our favorite music. No questions at all about our families or wives, I note.

After a few moments of this she asks what we want to drink, and gestures upward. I look up to where she seems to be pointing but don't see any menus or bottles, only a blank wall. She laughs and redirects my gaze further upward. Finally I see that there is a chandelier-like contraption hanging high over the table, and the contraption holds four inverted liquor bottles. I stand up to read the labels on the bottles in the dim light, then ask for a brandy on ice. She picks up a glass, takes two cubes of ice from a bucket on the table, then stands and stretches her body up and over the table to dispense some liquor into the glass. While performing this stretching exercise her very short skirt rises up almost (but not quite) enough to show us the color of her underwear, a fetching though somewhat contrived effect. Over the course of the next ninety minutes she does this a number of times, and I can see that the design of the decanting device is intended for exactly this purpose.

After warming up Yokota-san sufficiently (it must be obvious to her who will be paying the bill), the hostess turns her attention to me. Yokota-san has asked her to guess my age, and she does a convincing job of guessing too low and expressing complete amazement at my actual age. She speaks in English, and her grammar is excellent. I ask her if she studied in America.

"I lived for one year in United States," she says, "just one year."

"Going to school?"

"Yes, mostly."

(Yokota-san is busy talking with another hostess by now, a rather crooked-faced young woman from Kawasaki.)

I press for details, "College? Home stay?"

"I lived in the dorms. I was going to Lewis and Clark College... you know it?"

"Yes," I reply. Too close to home, I think to myself. I know a student there, the same age as this hostess assuming she stated her age correctly during the guessing game. The student I know is a one-year-older friend of my own daughter. I try to imagine this person in another environment, in a college class in Portland, Oregon. She has a soft and pretty face, very little makeup (relative to the other women in the room) and the image is not at all difficult to conjure.

"Lewis and Clark has sort of a reputation," I say.

"Reputation?"

"I hear it's a something of a party school."

She laughs a bit, "Yes, I studied lots of things there..." After a pause, "Do you smoke marijuana?"

"Not now," I say. Yokota-san is listening now, interested.

I look to the front of the bar. The bouncer is tall and broad-shouldered, with a sloping forehead and a long ponytail. He looks ready to beat the hell out of anyone. The cashier behind the counter is weasel of a man, thin and bent over, greasy-haired. The tables are stained, the chairs uncomfortable. The discount rate for the first half-hour is 1000 yen per person, around ten dollars. The weasel brings over a small clipboard and tells Yokota-san something. I see from the tab that it will cost another 6000 yen (60 dollars) for another thirty minutes of this fun. I look quizzically at Yokota-san, who is having some internal turmoil. Finally he turns to me and says, "Nagano-san will budget this". He nods to the weasel, who goes back into his corner.

I talk more with the English-speaking hostess, who confides to me that the name on her badge (Natsumi, or "summer seashore" as written in Kanji) is not her real name. "My real name starts with a B," she says, offering no further clarification.

She learns I'm from Seattle and starts talking more about herself. She wants to go back to Portland and open a clothing store on Hawthorne Street. "I like to design clothes," she says. "Do you know bubble-wrap?"

I'm not sure I've heard her right. "Bubble-wrap?"

"Yes, I made sleeves with it, and" she gestures to an electrical cord hanging from a lamp, "I used that also for straps."

"Amazing," I say.

I'm beginning to like "Natsumi". After her initial professional banter she has loosened up and is talking more engagingly. She's smart, free-thinking, and I'm wondering what on earth could have brought her to a hideous place like this. But there's no way to ask such a question without being a lout. So we make more small talk until the weasel appears again. Yokota-san squirms and I ask Natsumi, load enough for anyone at the table to hear, "Is he paying too much money?"

She looks directly at me from across the table, hiding her face from the weasel and pursing her lips. "It can be a problem," she says in English. She's being careful. Yokota-san is rather drunk, and he surrenders to the weasel; another 60 dollars is going to be spent before we get out of here.

Yokota-san is lighting his tenth cigarette, and Natsumi is teasing him gently about his health. Suddenly he leans over and cups his hand over my ear, speaking privately. "If you like Natsumi, just tell her your hotel and room number."

The weasel is coming toward us again. "Shall we go?" says Yokota-san. It is not even ten o'clock but it seems we've spent our entertainment budget for the night. Our company-sanctioned budget, that is. Yokota-san takes his time paying the bill at the counter while I stand at the door with Natsumi and the crooked-faced woman from Kawasaki. It has started to snow, and the two women look ridiculous in their quasi-school uniforms and short-short skirts. Yokota-san keeps glancing over at me. For his benefit I lean over close to Natsumi and, cupping my hand near her ear, say, "I'd like to visit your shop in Portland sometime." She nods and smiles, a little uncertain. Yokota-san comes out the door and we leave, heading down the street toward the station.

I leave Yokota-san at Sakuragicho station. Walking back to the hotel, I laugh aloud at the absurdity of the evening, causing a few people to turn and look at me. I'm drunk too.

But then I start to think about Natsumi (or whatever her name is) standing in the doorway of that seedy joint, flecks of snow appearing, then melting on her blue sweater, and I start to feel filthy and bit depressed. By the time I get to my room I want nothing more than a very long shower.