Free People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry

tottering on platform boots of stiltlike height, pairs of these girls converged on Roppongi, resembling hallucinatory, Day-Glo golliwogs. They came on the commuter lines from the suburbs and commuter towns of the outlying prefectures. They spent the evening, and then the night, at clubs and bars with names like Motown, Gaspanic, and the Lexington Queen. At dawn every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, a slightly smaller number of the unlucky ones made the melancholy journey back out of the city and home again on the first connecting train.
    Then there was the third group among the street tribes of Roppongi: young Caucasian women, who worked as dancers, strippers, and hostesses. They began to appear on the streets in the middle of the evening, hair shining after their workouts at the fitness center. They wore jeans and T-shirts. Before entering their clubs and bars to dress and make themselves up, they would fuel up for the evening at McDonald’s or KFC or the sushi restaurant on the crossing. They moved purposefully, without the diffidence of tourists, and for all the diversity of their origins—Australian, Kiwi, French, British, Ukrainian—they had something in common, apart from youth and prettiness. Something difficult to define: a set of the mouth or shoulders, suggesting defiance, irritation, even resentment. Unlike the friendly Japanese Roppongi girls, they were unapproachable. Lucie and Louise had come here to join their number.
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    Louise did, in fact, have a Japanese aunt, the wife of her mother’s younger brother. But Masako lived in south London, not in Tokyo. The suggestion that she was to be the girls’ host in Japan was a fib intended to ease the anxieties of Jane Blackman. Louise’s sister, Emma, still had friends living in Tokyo and it was through one of them, a Scottish girl named Christabel, that the room had been booked in Sasaki House. The railway journey from the airport was complicated and trying, requiring repeated changes and steep flights of stairs. Their suitcases were dead weights in their hands, their high heels were painfully impractical, and they were sore and sweating when they hauled their belongings out of the stingingly expensive taxi that carried them on the final leg to their new home.
    They had expected to arrive at a simple hostel, with crisply laundered bedding and an obliging manageress. Instead they found themselves in the category of Japanese accommodation known as the gaijin house—a guesthouse of single rooms, rented by Tokyo’s transient foreign population of backpackers, English teachers, street vendors, and night workers. Dying potted plants and bicycles were propped against its outside walls. Huge black crows perched on the cat’s cradle of utility wires overhead. “It was disgusting,” Louise remembered. “We were just in shock. We looked in the lounge, and there were two people stoned on the sofa. We came up to the room and Christa was in there doing her hair. She was putting this thick, gloopy oil all over it—it looked like fat. And they were all smoking spliffs. The room stank. You could hardly see inside with the smoke.”
    The window of the tiny room was curtainless; Lucie and Louise had to drape it with sarongs to keep out the morning sun. Not that there was a great deal of light to exclude; the only view was that of the cement wall of the neighboring building. The futon mattresses were sheetless, the mirror was cracked, and the squat toilet in the bathroom was unspeakable. Transforming the “shithouse” into a livable space—with posters, postcards, candles, drapes—was the achievement of their first week in Tokyo. It was by far the pokiest place in which either of them had ever lived.
    They slept for much of the next day, stunned by heat and jet lag. That evening, a Friday, they rode into Roppongi on borrowed bicycles with the half-formed ambition of finding jobs. Christa, who worked as a hostess herself, had given them the names of several