“Where are you from?” I asked her. “You’re not Japanese.” This last I said with some hesitation, as though inexperienced in such matters and therefore unsure.
“My mother was Japanese. I’m from Brazil.”
I’ll be damned, I thought. I was planning a trip to Brazil. A long trip.
“Brazil, where?”
“Bahia.”
Bahia is one of the country’s coastal states. “Salvador?” I asked, to determine the city.
“Yes!” she exclaimed, with the first genuine smile of the evening. “How do you know Brazil so well?”
“I’ve been there a few times. My firm has clients all over the world. Um pae brasileiro e uma mae Japonêsa-é uma combinação bonita,” I said in the Portuguese I had been studying with cassettes. A Brazilian father and a Japanese mother-it’s a beautiful combination.
Her eyes lit up and her mouth parted in a perfect O. “Obrigado!” she exclaimed. Thank you! Then: “Você fala português?” You speak Portuguese?
It was as though the real person had suddenly decided to reinhabit the hostess’s body. Her eyes, her expression, her posture had all come alive, and again I felt that vital energy that had animated her dancing.
“Only a little,” I said, switching back to English. “I’m good with languages and I try to pick up a bit from wherever I travel.”
She was shaking her head slowly and looking at me as though it was the first time she had seen me. She took a swallow of her drink, finishing it.
“One more?” I asked.
“Sim!” she answered immediately in Portuguese. Yes!
I ordered two more Taliskers, then turned to her. “Tell me about Brazil,” I said.
“What do you want to hear?”
“About your family.”
She leaned back and crossed her legs. “My father is a Brazilian blue blood, from one of the old families. My mother was second-generation Japanese.”
Brazil’s melting pot population includes some two million ethnic Japanese, the result of immigration that began in 1908, when Brazil needed laborers and Imperial Japan was looking to establish her people in different parts of the world.
“So you learned Japanese from her?”
She nodded. “Japanese from my mother, Portuguese from my father. My mother died when I was a child, and my father hired an English nanny so I could learn English, too.”
“How long have you been in Japan?”
“Three years.”
“The whole time at this club?”
She shook her head. “Only a year at the club. Before that I was teaching English and Portuguese here in Tokyo through the JET program.”
JET, or Japan Exchange and Teaching, is a government-sponsored program that brings foreigners to Japan primarily to teach their native languages. Judging from the average Japanese’s facility with English, the program could use some work.
“You learned to dance like that teaching language classes?” I asked.
She laughed. “I learned to dance by dancing. When I got here a year ago I was so shy I could barely move on the stage.”
I smiled. “That’s hard to imagine.”
“It’s true. I was raised in a very proper house. I never could have conceived of this kind of thing growing up.”
The waitress walked over and set down two crystal tumblers, each with a measure of Talisker, and two glasses of water. Naomi expertly tipped a drop of the water into the whiskey, swirled it once, and raised the tumbler to her nose. Had she still been in hostess mode she would have waited, taking her cue to drink from the customer. We were making progress.
“Mmmm,” she purred.
We touched glasses and drank.
She closed her eyes. “Oh,” she said. “That’s so good.”
I smiled. “How did you wind up here at world-famous Damask Rose?”
She shrugged. “My first two years in Japan, my salary was about three million yen. I was tutoring in the evening to make a little extra. One of my students told me he knew some people who were opening a club where I could make a lot more than I was making then. I checked it out. And here I am.”
Three million yen a year-maybe twenty-five thousand dollars. “This certainly looks like an improvement,” I said, looking around.
“It’s a good place. We make most of our money with private lap dances. Just dancing, no touching. If you’d like, I can do one for you. But no pressure.”
Lap dancing would be her economic bread and butter. That she had treated it as an afterthought was another good sign.
I looked at her. She really was lovely. But I was here for something else.
“Maybe later,” I said. “I’m enjoying talking with you.”
She smiled, perhaps flattered. Given her looks, my demurral must have been refreshing. Good.
I smiled back. “Tell me more about your family.”
She took another sip of the Talisker. “I have two older brothers. They’re both married and work in the family business.”
“Which is?”
“Agriculture. It’s a family tradition that the men go into the business.”
The reference to agriculture felt deliberately vague. From what I knew about Brazil, it could have meant coffee, tobacco, sugar, or some combination. It could also have meant real estate. I gathered that her family was wealthy but that she was discreet about it.
“What do the women do?” I asked.
She laughed. “The women study something trivial in college, so they have a proper education and can be good conversationalists at parties, then they get married into the right families.”
“I gather you decided to do something different.”
“I did the college part-art history. But my father and brothers expected me to get married after that and I just wasn’t ready.”
“Why Japan, then?”
She glanced upward and pursed her lips. “It’s silly, but whenever I hear Japanese it sounds like my mother to me. And I was starting to lose the Japanese I had acquired from her as a child, which was like losing part of her.”
For an instant I saw an image of my own mother’s face. She had died at home while I was in Vietnam.
“That’s not silly at all,” I said.
We were each quiet. Now, I thought.
“So, how do you like working here?” I asked.
She shrugged. “It’s okay. The hours are crazy, but the money is good.”
“Management treats you well?”
She shrugged again. “They’re okay. No one tries to make you do anything you don’t want to.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know. When you do lap dances, some customers want more. If the customers are happy, they come back and spend big money. So, in places like this, sometimes management can pressure the girls to make the customers happy. And to do other things.”
My expression was appropriately concerned. “Other things?”
She waved a hand. “Nothing,” she said.
Change tack. “What about the other girls?” I asked, looking around. “Where do they come from?”
“Oh, all over the world.” She pointed to a tall, auburn-haired beauty in a red-sequined dress who was charming Botox Boy. “That’s Elsa. She’s from Sweden. And that’s Julie next to her, from Canada. The girl who was dancing opposite me is Valentina, from Russia.”
“What about the girls from Japan?”
“That’s Mariko and Taeka,” she said, pointing to a petite pair at a corner table who had just said or done something to elicit gales of laughter from their two obviously inebriated, American-looking customers. She turned her head one way, then the other, then back to me. “I don’t see Emi or Yukiko. They must be getting ready to dance.”
“Seems like a good mix,” I said. “Do you all get along?”
She shrugged. “It’s like anywhere else. Some of your coworkers are your friends. Others you’re not so crazy about.”
I smiled as though preparing to enjoy a bit of gossip. “Who do you like, and who do you not like?”