Free Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir by Rory O'Neill

pavements, where the toilets wiped your ass for you, department stores sold single, huge polished apples in fancy presentation boxes, and we had absolutely no responsibilities and only one aim:
to have a good time
.
    We found a single room in a
gaijin
house (a ‘foreigner’ house) with five or six other young foreigners, all of whom were teaching English or hoping to. A creaking, traditional Japanese building with an outside toilet, it was squeezed precariously between newer ones on a commercial street. Our room, like the others, had a tiny sink, a single gas ring, a wardrobe, traditional
tatami
-mat flooring and, like a tired sitcom gag, a window that faced onto the neighbouring wall inches away. There was no air-conditioning and, in the intense summer humidity, I would soak a sheet in the tiny sink and sit on the floor wrapped in it, like a wet ghost.
    I found a job fairly quickly, teaching English for a large chain of schools through which I managed to wangle a work visa, but Helen had trouble: getting a visa was more complicated if you weren’t a graduate, and she had dropped out of college. Eventually she took a job in a small town in the countryside and became my visiting country cousin for a year before she became a student herself, returned to Tokyo, and we moved into a decent apartment with our own toilet and air-conditioning.
    The chain of English-language schools I worked for was a weird, vaguely cultish enterprise called Bi-Lingual,owned by Ms Minami, a middle-aged Japanese woman who styled herself as a cross between Kate Bush and a Victorian doll. Ms Minami was well known in Japan, where successful businesswomen were a novelty, and she affected a public image of soft-focus girlish eccentricity. Her bizarre Baby Jane aesthetic was half-heartedly translated into the schools, which, although mostly situated in business districts beside railway stations or in nondescript office buildings, were all candy-striped wallpaper, lace trimmings, pink plastic tables and reproduction ‘period’ furniture. Even the school’s logo was a giant pink bow. It was a school designed by a child who’d eaten too much candyfloss at Disneyland.
    But boring stuff, like work and visas (and food and sleep), was just an annoying distraction from my deadly serious mission to have fun. I quickly discovered and made a second home of Tokyo’s infamous gay district, Ni-chōme, a small warren of narrow streets crammed with tiny bars, a couple of which catered specifically to foreigners and the Japanese guys who liked them. For the first (but not the last) time in my life I was a fetish! I fell home drunk every morning and fell in love every night. I hoovered up dark-eyed, soft-lipped Japanese boys and marvelled at their spiky pubic hair. I climbed into bed with Korean waiters and woke up on futons with Israeli dancers, Canadian writers and a French hairdresser. A handsome big-dicked photographer took me back to hisstylish apartment and, to my mortification, during the night I drunkenly pissed his bed. I was young, fun and hungry for life, running around with my tongue out, like a puppy in a ball pen.
    The Japanese have a very relaxed, uncomplicated attitude to sex – including gay sex – unencumbered by prudery or guilt. However, social conventions are very strong and ‘alternative’ lifestyles are frowned upon, so, while gay sex might not be a big deal in itself, living a gay life and rejecting the expected path of a steady job with a wife and two kids is a very big deal indeed. So, although the denizens of Ni-chōme were generally looked upon with a kind of indulgent amusement, they were, nevertheless, considered misfits, which tended to attract kindred spirits.
    New Sazae was a small, dingy, one-room bar, bathed in the red glow of coloured light-bulbs up a flight of narrow stairs on the second floor of a small grey building. It wasn’t a gay bar so much as a
misfit
bar, whose clientele of punks, gangsters, artists, junkies,