Hostessing is a entertainment profession that is pretty unique to Japan. Hostesses entertain Japanese men with conversation, flirting, and general indulgence. They'll also escort men to restaurants and other entertainment venues. In a way, hostesses in Japan are what escorts would be in the united states if they didn't have sex with their clients. Considering that semi-legal prostitution is pretty abundant in Japan, it isn't too strange that hostesses weren't expected to be physical sex workers. Above all, a hostess is expected to be sexually alluring, but not available. They make their money by being good conversationalists and fun to be around. They aren't cheap either. An evening with a hostess can easily run you a couple thousand dollars.
So Chelsea Haywood spent three months pouring drinks and lighting cigarettes for rich Japanese men. She flirted with these men and managed to hustle fancy dinners and presents out of them. Of course, this sort of misses the two-way nature of her relationship with her clients. These men aren't starry-eyed drones. They plied these dinners and gifts on Chelsea because it amused them to do so. In a way, it is almost refreshing that most of these client-hostess relationships are grounded in a pretty good understanding of the nature of the transaction. The men understand that being a hostess is a job, not a hobby. On the other hand, some of Haywood's most exciting encounters are with men who weren't quite able to understand the client-provider nature of their interactions.
I liked that Haywood's view of Japan was pretty focused. 90-Day Geisha about being a foreign hostess in a Tokyo hostess bar. She has a very clear approach to writing and is able to give you a feel for this area pretty effortlessly. I felt like I really understood what it would be like to roam the nightlife areas of downtown Tokyo.
It was also pretty refreshing to see the things that Chelsea left out. She didn't try to come to some kind of grand thesis on the nature of Japanese culture. She had some good insights into the Japanese men who come to hostess bars. She stayed true to what she had experienced without trying to overgeneralize.
She also didn't try to over-romanticize hostessing. You get the impression at the end of the book that hostessing is brutally hard work, a bit morally injurious and not the kind of thing that most people can do sustainably. She admits to using some drugs in the course of her experience and admits to drinking WAY too much. She manages to transmit the feeling of exhaustion she felt while working nights that turned into days that turned into nights.
While this book is really honest about its limitations (I mean, it is entitled 90-Day Geisha), I can't avoid bringing up this sort of obvious fact. This is a book about someone who lived in Japan and worked as a hostess for three months. That's it. It's a little hard to not take just her insights and wonder, "Is this something that only a new hostess would think?". She's certainly very smart, but I'm left with some doubts. To phrase it another way, what would *you* think about a book entitled, 90-Day Businessman? It could be a really interesting book, but you have to be aware of its limited scope.
A lot of memoirs get dinged in reviews for being too documentary. They talk about the whos, whats and whens, to the neglect of the whys and hows. 90-Day Geisha doesn't have this problem. If anything, it has the opposite problem. I found myself at the end of the book wanting to know more about the mechanics of Chelsea's work as a hostess. Haywood and her husband seemed to almost always be on the verge of destitution. I could never figure out why her hostess salary and gifts/tips from clients were barely enough to pay for rent and food. If this was a problem she only had early on, she never quite made it clear when hostessing became a profitable job. Certainly many of the other hostesses she worked with were hostessing for the money. Haywood seemed to be working herself half to death, so I'm a bit mystified that this didn't seem to translate into financial success.
One of the oddest stories in the book relates to Chelsea's possible experiences working as a hostess for Joji Obara. Joji Obara is a murdered and serial rapist who was arrested for the rape and murder of a British hostess named Lucie Blackman. Chelsea finds out that she was working as a hostess at the same club as Lucie Blackman. She also uncovers some semi-evidence that one of her customers is actually Obara himself. This would be an exciting story except for two things. First, Haywood doesn't appear to ever do enough investigation to determine one way or the other whether this guy is really Obara. Second, she doesn't seem to do anything about the possible reemergence in the hostessing scene of a man who was famous for raping and murdering hostesses. You would think this would be one of those issues you can't just ignore. We never find out the truth and are left scratching our heads as this episode is quickly forgotten.
My last complaint is that the book seems to end too abruptly. Chelsea and her husband left Japan and moved back to Canada at the end of three months. She never really said what she thought of the whole experience. Would she do it again? Did she have fun doing it, or was it only useful as fodder for a book?
Overall, I found 90-Day Geisha
to be an fairly entertaining book. It didn't try to do too much as a book and succeeded by limiting its focus. If you're interested in one person's exploration of an aspect of Japanese nightlife, this would be a good read. I would also point you in the direction of Tokyo Vice
(an awesome story about a American working as a Japanese police reporter), if you like books on the underbelly of Japanese culture.
