Continued … I looked over at Louise. That night she had arrived with the customer we called "the Cowboy," given his penchant for droning country and western songs all night long. (Hank Williams and Patsy Cline were his favorites.) He was in the middle of "Crazy" and Louise, her hands on his shoulders, was gazing at the Cowboy in ecstatic adoration, or some perfect imitation of it.

"The way she looks at him, she looks like she's completely in love with him," my customer said in a hushed voice. "She's a very good hostess."

She was. The ability to fake love may be the hostess's most important skill. Every girl at Verdor had a minimum of one or two serious customers who either accompanied her to the club after dinner or came to meet her there on a regular basis. It wasn't hard to keep track of which customer was whose, and what he came for. Amanda's best customer was a slave to her bullying and strong intelligence; Tara's patrons were wild about her golden beauty and prima ballerina hauteur; Elise's men loved her singing voice.

A hostess has to identify her strengths and play off them, because the competition is stiff. Most clubs are notorious for fur-flying catfights, where kittenish women battle it out for customers among the fast-draining supply. Japan is, after all, in a recession, and things are getting harder for everyone.

As the weeks went by and I realized that my mama-san, Midori, fired girls who couldn't trick customers into falling for them quickly enough, I became puzzled. I didn't understand how I had succeeded where other girls had failed. (When I was an 8-year-old Girl Scout I had been voted, on a camping trip, "the hostess with the mostest" for my skills at ushering in girls at mealtime, but that couldn't have been prophetic.)

My customers enjoyed talking about literature and appreciated my sincere interest in Japanese culture and karaoke. But I still didn't understand what they were looking for in me.

I asked Mr. Kobayashi, a consultant and former politician, why he preferred me, and he replied, "When we men come here, we come to take part in a fairy tale. You believe in that fairy tale."

He had hit on something. It was true that, as a bit of a dreamer, I did relish being part of a fantasy: donning a foreign persona (the ideal beloved, the fatal temptress, the dream woman) and leaving reality at home. That is what I thought the "floating world" was all about.

And in some ways it is a fairy tale. For a few hours, an aging man - most of the regulars were over 50 - gets to spend time with a lovely young woman, with no complications in sight. For a few hours, the woman is paid to act as if she adores him. In this situation, even the typical lack of sex could be considered an advantage, because it makes for a more idealized, more aestheticized affair.

Being somewhat of a perfectionist, I took my new occupation more seriously than I probably ought to have taken it. In the beginning, at least, I strove to be an impeccable companion. I remember the heart palpitations that overtook me the first time I went out to dinner with a customer before work -- my first douhan, Mr. Mori. Arriving at work on the arm of your patron was, in theory, kind of like entering a ballroom with a gorgeous date; all the other girls who had come to work unaccompanied would look over enviously, and you could hold your head higher, basking in Midori's approving smile.

In reality, however, you were probably already drunk on champagne (your customer having gotten a jump-start on making you tipsy) and already sick of his highly limited conversation (most men talked about work, the weather and sex - and little else). One of the advantages of having a devoted patron, however, is that his talk tends to be a little less smutty than that of occasional customers who come to carouse with their drinking buddies. After all, serious customers really do want you to like them.

The serious ones take you to the best restaurants in Tokyo - or at least what they consider the best. I've been treated to dinner at exquisite and intimate restaurants that serve steak made from the famous hand-massaged, beer-fed Kobe cows. But I've also been taken to some very odd places, like a members-only restaurant where everything is high class, from the well-trained waiters and beautiful furniture to the foie gras, except that the waitresses are dressed like Playboy bunnies. (I can't seem to get away from them.)

Usually, if she has a douhan, a hostess will meet her customer around 6 or 7 for a leisurely dinner before they go to the club together. This is the expected plan. I've rarely heard of a customer asking a girl to dinner on a weeknight and then flatly refusing to accompany her to her club afterward, though some men do try to get out of this expensive part of the bargain. After dinner it's usually enough to just lightly take the customer's arm and tell the cabdriver to head toward Akasaka - and he acquiesces. You both have roles to play.

It's the woman's job to figure out how to burrow so deeply into her customer's heart that she will not be dislodged, no matter what he has to pay to be entertained by her or how many leggy foreign girls flash smiles at him. Hostesses do this in a variety of ways. Sandra, for instance, strengthened the bond with her clumsiest customer by asking him to take social dance lessons with her on Saturdays. Amanda, a true dominatrix, constantly sent her customers firm and witty e-mails, literally demanding their company at the club.

I received instruction on how to care for Mr. Suzuki, one of my fans, from Midori herself. "He likes to be yelled at," she told me.

"Really?"

"Yes, yes - slam the phone down on him when he calls you. He'll come to the club that night."

I tried this, and it worked. This wasn't the art of love, it was the art of war.

In this game of manipulation you have to make fast decisions. If a love-struck customer shows up at the club while you're with another "suitor," you have to play it right, perhaps by faking a tantrum while the first customer is in the restroom, demanding to the waiter that he switch your seating in tones loud enough for the second man to overhear. With the first man, however, you still have to act sweet and fascinated - you can't let either one suspect your faithlessness.

Sometimes girls have to make changes in their personality and outward level of intelligence, maybe even adjusting their fluency in Japanese. Less is sometimes more, and some men prefer to talk to girls they perceive to be dumb. Others, however, enjoy wide-ranging conversations about their favorite topics - current affairs, travel, history, literature -- and hostesses sometimes bone up on customers' pet subjects in an attempt to impress them. When you talk to a customer, it is also important to make your life sound exciting - and to never talk about bills or mundane worries or your "real" love relationships.

Keeping the conversation rolling and acting "genki" (or lively) are key to success as a hostess. After all, you're supposed to be more interesting than the women the men see on a daily basis -- their girlfriends or their wives. In their minds, they always have room for one more woman.

Despite the obvious insincerity of the "love" for sale in such an environment, many customers do fall for their favorite hostess and expect their feelings to be reciprocated -- never mind whether their age is two or three times that of the girl.

All my fellow hostesses had that problem - customers who believed that the girl they paid so handsomely to drink and dine with them was a girlfriend. Of course, we each fed those hopes. A hostess plays a strung-out game involving that most ancient question: Will she or won't she? Her job is to get as much money as possible out of the customer before he realizes that she won't. At that time, he might move on to another girl or simply abandon that club altogether. Still, many customers hang in there month after month, with a resigned attitude and an open checkbook.

These rather desperate fantasies become more explicable when you consider the cultural environment. Throughout Japanese literature and aesthetics, the preferred kind of love is one marked by poignant sadness - the unrequited desire, the dying bride, the lovers who have no chance to be together except through double suicide. Seen in this light, the "floating world" of geisha and hostess clubs may be desirable because of the very impossibility of true love within it.

Still, to really make this fantasy work, the hostess has to be either a calculating bitch or something of a dreamer - maybe a little of both. She has to get something out of it, and if money isn't the only thing she cares about, then she has to, at some level, emotionally value her customers' worship of her. I know I did; in a way, this false love was addictive.

I looked forward to seeing my customers' faces light up when I met them at restaurants before work; I went out of my way to look attractive so that my appearance would reflect well on them. That, after all, was a great part of what they were paying for. I did my best to entertain them with talk and flattery and singing, since I wanted to justify their regard for me, especially when they saw such a limited part of me.

Other women had more serious problems with love and its fakery. Sherry, one co-worker, fell in love with a 40-year-old married customer, only to have him drop her for Louise, another hostess at Verdor. She lost both him and the money she had made before and while he was her boyfriend. (She saw him outside of work for free during their affair, but he continued to meet her at the club as a paying customer.) For weeks afterward she had to force back tears as he fawned over his new girlfriend at the next table. By the time I left Verdor he was already flirting with a third hostess.

Like this playboy, a hostess is likely to be juggling several customers at once, but she has to be careful to appear neither too popular nor too desperate. To do well in the business, it's best to have two or three serious patrons at any given time. But avoiding collisions - two customers at the club at once, for instance - is like running an obstacle course in high heels. You have to come across as faithful, even though everyone knows that it's your job to not be.

One customer invited me to spend the night in the house he shared with his wife. On Valentine's Day in Japan, it's the women who have to give the men chocolates. Things are righted on White Day, one month later, when men are expected to reciprocate with presents much more expensive than those they received.

I went out on a douhan (a dinner and club date) with Mr. Mori on White Day, and he presented me with a pair of earrings. "What did you give your wife?" I asked him, trying to make conversation.

He seemed genuinely surprised. "Oh, nothing."

This is pretty typical. The vast majority of my customers were married and claimed that their wives didn't mind their visits to Verdor. When I asked why, one explained, perhaps too hopefully: "If we came straight home after work, we'd still have all the tension of the workday with us. This kind of a place allows us to get rid of our bad energy before we go home, so our wives are grateful for that."

Mr. Kobayashi had a more pragmatic take on the situation: "My wife is happy with our relationship: I go out and work, and she stays at home and takes care of the money."

"So she wouldn't mind if you had an affair with a hostess?" I asked him.

"She and I have an agreement. If she ever catches me having an affair, I have to give her 100,000 yen - about $1,000. I think she prays that I'll get a girlfriend!"

Customers often take time away from their wives to see a hostess. A loyal customer expects to occasionally meet his hostess on the weekend for dinner or an excursion outside of Tokyo. Favorite destinations are the ancient capital of Kyoto and the snow festivals of Hokkaido, Tokyo, Disneyland and even high-end strip clubs (to watch, not participate, as my friend Sandra, who went to a club called Seventh Heaven with one of her more eccentric customers, informed me).

While these outings are nominally fun, there is always an aspect of work to them, because you can never appear to be tired or less than completely enthralled.

Some customers pay for the hostess's time during these outings. Mr. Mori paid me $500 to go with him, dressed in French couture and enthusiastic smiles that made my face ache, to see the plum blossoms at one of Japan's most famous gardens, located an hour outside of Tokyo in his hometown of Mito.

Originally he'd asked me to stay the night in Mito. I had refused, giving a dance class the next morning as my excuse. But he wasn't offering to put me up in a hotel: He was inviting me to spend the night at the house he shared with his wife. "She's very excited to meet you."

I was a little taken aback. "Mrs. Mori doesn't mind?"

"No. I told her how interested you were in Japanese literature. And that you are my English teacher," he joked, citing a common cover job for a hostess in Tokyo.

"So she doesn't know where we met?"

"Oh, she does."

Instead of reassuring me, this conversation just made the situation more alarming. I told him I'd have to take the evening train back for my class. He still gave me the money for accompanying him to view the plum trees. Some men negotiate with hostesses about a weekend "time charge" for their company, but not, in most cases, for any sexual favors.

Not all of the men who frequented clubs were married. Two of my younger customers were still single, and an older one, Mr. Tanaka, a former test pilot, had vowed never to marry after the fiancée of his youth left him, frightened away by his perilous job. He regretted this decision and was lonely.

The hostess club truly was his family now, with Midori as the matriarch and her hostesses part daughters, part lovers. He genuinely wanted to help us - as a financial patron and loving uncle - but he desired us too. As he said to Midori about both me and Amanda, "They are like daughters, but also like yama no kami" - using a humorous term for "wife" in Japanese that literally means "goddess of the mountain."

As for my younger single customers, 32-year-old Mr. Suzuki was convinced, despite the fact that he never saw me on my own time, that I would eventually marry him. He had been coming to clubs for 10 years, and although he must have known on some level that paying a woman to spend time with him wasn't the ideal basis for matrimony, he still persisted in his suit.

"I am from a samurai family. I'd be a good husband," he assured me.

I initially played along with his delusions, for the benefit of my job. While I never accepted his proposals, neither did I come right out and say that I wouldn't be his wife. Gradually, however, I began to feel guilty, because of his obvious mental instability. When I finally told him flat out that I wouldn't marry him, or even kiss him, he dropped me and disappeared from the club, undoubtedly to continue his search for a wife in another venue.

Of course, such establishments hold little attraction for most young men, married or not. Leftovers from a bygone age when decorum was paramount, Verdor and clubs like it are largely patronized by old men - very rich old men. Especially in the current Japanese economy, when customers are far less likely than in the past to be on expense accounts, only the wealthiest can afford to drop nearly $1,000 for several hours of (more or less) pristine conversation.

Even if the company isn't paying, men still often come with their co-workers. In Japan, business has often been conducted after hours, in the presence of well-coifed women, who are thought to make businessmen feel more relaxed and generous than they would in a boardroom. But even if they are not conducting business, customers are apt to bring office cronies along. In Japan men spend far more time with co-workers and hostesses than they do with their wives and families.

Mr. Murakami, one of Midori's best customers, inevitably dragged along with him, as his personal sidekick and straight man, Mr. Tawa, the president of one of the several companies he owned. While his right-hand man was made to sing Elvis Presley numbers, this septuagenarian would grab the girl nearest to him, spin her across the dance floor and ask loudly, "You want me? I send you to heaven! Not very big, but very hard. Many girls say so!" By the end of the night Murakami would be collapsed in a drunken stupor. Apparently heaven would have to wait.

The hostesses felt bad for Tawa, whose job was roughly equivalent to ours: He had to fawn over Murakami, laugh at his jokes, agree with his boasts and sing on request. Despite the fact that he was a president himself, the rules of Japanese hierarchy made it such that he was reduced to the role of a near pimp, for it was Tawa who called hostesses on weekends to see if we'd like to join Murakami on his yacht. ("No, thank you.")

Other men use hostesses to try to impress their co-workers. Mr. Kajiwara secretly invited three junior employees to join our douhan. It was technically against the rules, because if he wanted me to entertain his cohorts, Midori would have preferred that it happen at the club, where they would all have to pay. But I didn't mind because I liked Kajiwara as a friend, finding him the smartest, most sarcastic and most realistic of all my customers.

Even he, however, was not beneath a white lie or two. He told his friends that he saw me on the weekends more often than he did. (I had gone to dinner with him twice on a Sunday, but that was it.) For my part, I joked with his co-workers about him and, doing my job, asked them to come back with Kajiwara and me to the club.

"I'd like to," one of them said politely. "But I can't afford it."

Men used to be willing to pay to go to hostess clubs, but fewer and fewer are falling under their spell. Younger men frequently go out carousing with their co-workers at night, but are now more likely to go to regular bars or izakaya - traditional, cheap drinking establishments.

I like to think that after Kajiwara's friends left us, they went home to their wives - for once at a reasonable hour.

The reason most hostesses refrain from selling sex is far less noble than you might imagine. It's because selling sex is less lucrative, in the long run, than selling companionship. A customer keeps coming to a club because of the 1 percent chance that a hostess may one day give in to his desires. If his desires were satisfied, he might lose interest in her - that's the risk she'd take. The chase is half the fun for the customer and most of the money for the girl.

Besides, why work that hard?

As one former hostess, now a mama-san, put it, "If you're good at what you do, you don't have sex with them. You don't have to."

But, as with love in general, hostessing isn't that simple. Not anymore, at least. For some time now, the geisha has been considered far too expensive for even a moderately wealthy customer. But now hostess clubs like Verdor are also being crossed off the list of budget watchers. Men who could afford it nevertheless whined about the prices at Verdor.

This frugality is a relatively recent development, and it especially affects foreign hostesses. Unlike a decade ago in Japan, postmodern Holly Golightlys can no longer hope to make $1,000 just for showing up for dinner with bleached-blond hair.

The change is the result of altered expectations as much as financial pressures. While Verdor, like the geisha system of old, still stresses the importance of long-term patrons, simpler and cheaper options - like One Eyed Jack and Harlem Night - are popping up everywhere. They have an assembly-line hostessing style that aims for short-term satisfaction rather than commitment.

After all, why pay $200 per hour for conversation if you can get a peep show - and more -- for far less? The tastes of the average Japanese consumer are changing, along with his fantasies. If he's going to drop big money, he wants to get all he can - and I'm not talking about good haiku.

Because of this, the high-class hostess, like her proverbial stepmother the geisha, is becoming a thing of the past. I didn't realize this at first, but it hit me at the same time my fantasy of being a sophisticated but nonsexual companion was finally shattered. I did not want to sell sex; I wanted to sell its most alluring fantasy. But fantasies just aren't enough in Japan these days.

Even in a refined place like Verdor, the men are still men. Highly common is the customer who, though gentlemanly when sober, becomes all hands when drunk. While such behavior is in principle frowned upon at a place like Verdor, it's the hostess's job, rather than the mama-san's or the manager's, to control it, usually by laughing and scolding the customer like a naughty child: "Bad, bad boy." But that tactic sometimes arouses the men even more, since many of them are there to be babied.

Others are sneaky and plot carefully to steal a kiss or a touch from their favorite girl. Sherry, one of my co-workers, realized this too late when her customer took her to O-Daiba, an amusement park on a small island south of Tokyo - though she was a little suspicious of his urgency to get on the Ferris wheel and his purchase of a bottle of wine with a twist-off cap.

Sure enough, once the Ferris wheel - one of the tallest in the world, which takes an hour to make one revolution - started moving, he pounced on her. Sherry knew that she was trapped for the next hour, and he knew it too, so she tried her best to distract him from his groping with frantic conversation. "It was the longest hour of my life," she told me. When I related the story to another customer, he enviously remarked, "What a good idea! Trapped her on the Ferris wheel!" I can guess where he took his next unsuspecting hostess.

I never got stuck on an amusement park ride with a lustful customer, but I did have some problems in taxis. Men who stayed at the club until closing often offered to give me a ride home, and since taxis in Japan cost about four times those in the U.S., I'd usually take them up on their offer. Sometimes they'd invite me to stop for a bite to eat or a drink on the way home. To get out of any side trips, I'd tell them I was really tired or that I had to study the next day.

One night I shared a taxi with one of my most devoted customers, who had been a perfect gentleman so far. When the car stopped at the house I shared with my boyfriend, he grabbed me and kissed me. He was much stronger than I would have thought a 60-year-old could be.

I pulled away and ran inside, but I still had to call him the next day to thank him for dinner. He asked me if he could take me to Disneyland in Tokyo that weekend. "I'm not feeling so well," I told him. In fact, I did feel a little sick to my stomach - I was disappointed in him and in my profession.

An executive at Shiseido cosmetics company had a more straightforward way of getting a kiss or caress from his favorite hostesses: He negotiated with makeup samples. "One kiss, one lipstick. One touch, five lipsticks," he said to me with a straight face. "You can't be serious," I balked.

"Oh, yes. Shiseido is a very good product. Girls like very much. You want?"

"Sorry, the shades don't match my skin tone."

In spite of such exchanges, I still held out hope that the elegance of the floating world was alive and well somewhere.

I liked the fact that Verdor's richest customers stopped at geisha clubs in Akasaka before coming to our place. I thought this testified to their cultured tastes. Some proudly sang the old geisha songs they had learned during the time of extravagant patronage.

When I asked one of these men what had made him give up the company of the treasured geisha to come hang out with us, he told me, "If I stayed there any longer I'd get too drunk! Geisha are real alcoholics, and they make you play too many drinking games. And they always win. Here I can relax!"

This man, one of Midori's biggest spenders, had enthroned my friend Sandra and me as his favorites. He was an old hand at being the top client of a hostess club, and he knew how to create a scene if we weren't seated with him as soon as he arrived. He took turns squeezing both of our waists and singing folk songs. Small, dapper and white-haired, he seemed harmless enough, even sweet - until he started propositioning me.

"You can become my mistress, earn very good money in a short time," he told me.

He repeatedly offered me $20,000 to sleep with him - a high figure, but not out of line with the sums that get thrown around in such places. Men know that women in the top-notch clubs, particularly North American and Western European hostesses, aren't likely to be won over with a small amount of money. Having been a hostess for several months by this point, I had to admire his realistic attitude. (At least he knew a young woman wasn't going to lust after a man three times her age without some monetary incentive.)

But my final answer every time he broached the subject was "No."

He also made overtures to Sandra, who was a more practical type. "Look, Cynthia, it would be over in about five minutes. Maybe we could even get him to go higher."

"Higher?"

"By offering to both sleep with him at once."

She was serious about this. The way she described the hypothetical scene with this little snow-haired man was actually pretty comical. But in the end I just couldn't do it. It seemed too absurd - a grandfather paying two young girls a small fortune for an ephemeral pleasure. This wasn't the dream I wanted to create for this man or anyone else.

Yet the offer did give me a pleasant feeling. I was amused that I could have become a sort of "bodhisattva whore," one of the saintly courtesans famous in Japanese literature for enlightening their paying lovers by teaching them about the instability of love and the human body.

Certainly, my powers to empathize had grown since I'd started working in Japan. To be a successful hostess, after all, you have to be a little bit in love with your customers as you sit next to them, paid to smile and flatter and dream in unison. Or you have to be a little drunk.

I talked Sandra out of accepting the big spender's offer for the time being, but when I left Japan, she was again considering his proposal. "To talk about it is one thing; it's another thing to do it," she admitted. She wasn't in desperate need of money, so my guess is that she probably didn't go through with it. But who knows - stranger things have happened to nice girls in that kind of place.

I know of only one girl at a top hostess club who did exchange sex for money. Amy was a New Zealander who worked for Toni, my friend's Spanish mama-san. Amy kept quiet about her transactions of the flesh. Clearly she was smart, but her careful plans were spoiled when Toni discovered what she was doing.

Toni was furious and felt that Amy's behavior was jeopardizing her business. And it was true that after they got what they wanted, at least two customers stopped coming to the club. (Their sudden departures were what tipped off Toni about Amy's extracurricular activities.)

Toni couldn't afford to lose even one customer. What might have helped Amy in the short term was destructive for Toni's longevity in the business. The hostess, after all, is a metonym of the mama-san, and Amy's behavior reflected badly on Toni. It cheapened her image. Toni fired Amy, and no one seemed to know what happened to her after that.

Unlike Amy, most foreign hostesses walk the fine line between decorative commodity and near prostitute, thinking little of it. Perhaps this is because in Japan - where foreigners are called "gaijin," meaning "outsiders" - visitors are already relegated to the margins of society. When you're such a marginal figure, everything is up for grabs.

June 22nd, 2001