Meet Issei. He's the top draw at an exclusive Japanese host club where his job is, as he puts it, to "sell dreams." He and his fellow hosts - glam-rock coiffed, androgynous young men dressed to the nines - provide companionship to their female patrons in the form of well-placed compliments, good-natured teasing, mostly
platonic physical contact, and lots and lots of booze. His clients are attractive, stylish women in their 20's yearning to be loved, appreciated, and affirmed by their relationship with their host. They are apparently quite wealthy as well, as they are paying a pretty penny for the opportunity to be doted upon like a princess. At $500 for a single bottle of champagne, drinks at the host club are not cheap, and the drinks must keep flowing lest your favorite host be drawn away to another table. The women admit to spending $1000, $2000, even $5000 a night here, egged on by overzealous hosts and the need to compete with other patrons. Many of them appear to be regulars, returning several times a month. You start to wonder, where do these young women get the money to sustain their lavish "relationship"? Then you discover, and here's the ironic twist here, that many of them work as prostitutes, selling their bodies to older men in their 40's and 50's. It's a kind of fucked-up cycle whereby the women go out providing sex and fake companionship to men, then come to the host club to receive "real love" from the hosts. Only, in order to sustain that relationship, they have to go out and earn a lot of money very quickly, the easiest way, of course, by tricking. Everyone seems to be manipulating everybody else here, but it's the women who seem to be screwed over the most - by the johns using their bodies for sex to the hosts who have no qualms about overcharging them 10 times the price of a cheap bottle of champagne, hosts who must appear equally available to all their clients and thus emotionally close to none of them. If this is the dream that's being sold, it's a sad, viciously exploitative one, a desperate game of keeping loneliness at bay at a price much, much higher than the tab at the end of the night. Great happiness space, indeed.
April 3, 2007
