Free People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry Page A

clubs, but they were still finding their bearings when a good-looking young Japanese man approached and politely asked if he could be of assistance. Were Lucie and Louise looking for work? he asked. Were they interested in working as hostesses? If they came with him, he said, he could introduce them to people who might be able to help.
    Warily, they followed the man up Outer Moat East Avenue and into one of the buildings with the neon-lit signboards. The first club had no vacancies, but at the second they were greeted warmly. The young guide was obviously well known to its manager, a gloomy man named Mr. Nishi. He looked them over, asked them a few rudimentary questions—age, nationality, where they were staying—and offered them jobs on the spot. Within days of arriving in Japan, Lucie and Louise were working as hostesses in a small Roppongi nightclub with the name of Casablanca.

 
    5. GEISHA GIRL! (JOKE)
    Unless you knew exactly what you were looking for, you could have passed by a thousand times and never cast a second glance at Club Casablanca. The building in which it nestled was brown and anonymous; from the street the only token of its existence was the long vertical signboard, where it was crowded out by the names of more exotic and intriguing establishments. There was Raki Raki, and the Gay Arts Stage, and Seventh Heaven, one of Tokyo’s biggest strip clubs, whose lurid neon dominated the front of the building. Casablanca was on the sixth floor. The elevator opened to face a heavy-looking door plumply upholstered in padded leather and with a brassy plaque bearing the club’s name.
    Beyond it was a dimly lit room, perhaps twenty feet by sixty. To the left, rows of bottles glinted behind a low bar. To the right was an electric keyboard on a raised stand and the screen and speakers of a karaoke system. Around the walls were couches and armchairs in pale blue and twelve low tables. Framed prints or paintings were indistinctly visible on the walls.
    An Asian man of indeterminate age and nationality guided the customer to one of the tables, on which stood a complicated glass siphon that dispensed water through a pump. A bucket of ice, metal tongs, and a chunky decanter of whiskey were brought—tools and ingredients for the blending of mizuwari , the whiskey-and-water mix that is the staple drink of the older salaryman. Despite the pompous details—the leather door, the black bow ties worn by the waiters and barman—it was a space wholly lacking in glamour. The whiskey in the decanter was cheap and sickly; the electric keyboard was crude and blurting; the water siphon, which tried so hard to be impressive, was merely baffling. The club strove for an effect of languid luxury, but the atmosphere was more cozy than sophisticated, with a droopy pretension suggesting the second-class lounge of one of the cheaper cruise liners, or a failing Las Vegas casino, or middle-class suburban England in the 1970s. You half expected the waiter to appear with a plate of pineapple chunks impaled on cocktail sticks with cubes of cheddar cheese.
    But this was a Japanese establishment, and to a certain Japanese eye it had a crepuscular allure. The reasons for this were seated at the two tables closest to the bar: a group of foreign hostesses, most, but not all of them, Caucasian. “It was a rather dark place and I had a strange feeling about it,” said Hajime Imura, a publisher who visited Casablanca a couple of times when Lucie worked there. “It had a kind of mysterious atmosphere, suspicious. There were girls of different colors of skin, perhaps Israeli or something. The room was dark, shades of black and blue. Dark chairs and tables. A Filipino singer, very loud. A middle-aged man who seemed to be the manager, a few waiters, maybe Filipino—Asian faces. About ten girls.”
    When the customer was comfortably settled with his mizuwari, the manager would signal to the table of foreign girls. Two of them would detach themselves and