You wouldn’t need a street map to get to the club: the building was visible for miles around, the gargoyles choking their red flames into the night. We reached the building as darkness came. I stood and stared up at it until the others got bored waiting, and took my arm and guided me into a glass lift that went up the outside of the skyscraper, all the way to the top where the Marilyn Monroe sign was swinging to and fro among the stars. The ‘crystal lift’, they told me it was called, because it was like a crystal catching and scattering all the lights of Tokyo. I stood with my nose pressed to the glass as it soared up outside the building, amazed by how quickly the greasy street dropped away beneath us.
‘Wait here,’ said Jason, when the lift stopped. We were in a marble-floored reception area, separated from the club by doors of industrial aluminium. A giant model of a red rose, five foot tall, stood in a huge vase in one corner. ‘I’ll send Mama-san out.’ He indicated a plush velvet chaise-longue, and disappeared with the Russians through the doors. I caught a glimpse of a club as big as a skating rink – occupying the entire top of the building, skyscrapers reflected in the polished floor – a constellation of lights. Then the door swung closed and I was left, sitting on the chaise-longue, with only the top of the hat-check girl’s head visible over the counter for company.
I crossed my legs, then uncrossed them. I looked at my vague reflection in the aluminium doors. Stencilled in black on the doors were the words Some Like It Hot.
The club’s Mama-san, Strawberry Nakatani, was an old hand, according to Jason. She had been a call girl in the seventies, famous for turning up to clubs naked under her white fur coat, and when her husband, a show-business impresario and minor hoodlum, died, he had given her the club. ‘Don’t look surprised when you see her,’ Jason warned. Her life was devoted to Marilyn Monroe, he said. She’d had her nose reconstructed, and had got unethical surgeons in Waikiki to put western lines into her eyelids. ‘Just act like you think she looks fabulous.’
I put my hands on my skirt, pressing it down against my thighs. You have to be very brave or desperate to stick things out, and I was about to give up, stand and turn for the lift when the aluminium doors opened and out she stalked: a small, bleached woman dressed in a gold lamé Marilyn Monroe dress, carrying an ornate cigarette-holder and a fur stole. She was boxy and muscular, like a Chinese war-horse, and her Asian hair had been peroxided, ferociously backcombed into a Marilyn bob. She clipped across to me on her stilettos, flinging back her fur stole, licking her fingers and smoothing her haircut into shape. She stopped a few inches in front of me, saying nothing, letting her eyes flick over my face. That is it, I thought, she’s going to throw me out.
‘Stand up.’
I stood.
‘Where you from? Hmmm?’ She prowled in a circle, looking at the wrinkled black tights, Irina’s stilettos crammed with paper. ‘Where you come from?’
‘England.’
‘England?’ She stood back and plugged a cigarette into the holder, narrowing her eyes. ‘Yes. You look like English girl. What you want to work here for? Eh?’
‘The same reason everyone wants to work here.’
‘What that, then, hmm? You like Japanese man?’
‘No. I need the money.’
Her mouth curled then, as if she was amused. She lit the cigarette. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘ Peachy.’ She tilted her head and blew the smoke in a stream over her shoulder. ‘You try tonight. You nice to customer I give you three thousand yen an hour. Three thousand. Okay?’
‘Does that mean you want me to work?’
‘Why you surprised? You want something else? Three thousand. Take it or fly away, lady. I can’t give you no more.’
‘I just thought…’
Mama Strawberry held up her hand to silence me. ‘And if it goes peachy tonight, then tomorrow you come back and you wear nice dress. Okay? You no wear nice dress and you pay ten thousand yen penalty. Penalty. You get it, lady? This very high-class club.’
The club seemed to me the most magical place I’d ever seen – the floor like a starlit pool floating fifty storeys above the world, surrounded on all sides by panoramic views of the Tokyo skyline, the video screens on neighbouring buildings showing newsreels and music videos. I moved through it in a kind of nervous awe, looking at the ikebana flower arrangements, the muted downlighting. One or two customers were already there, small men in business suits, at tables dotted around, some in banquettes, some in deep leather armchairs, pools of smoke hanging above the tables. On a raised platform a thin-faced piano-player in his bow-tie warmed up with tinkling arpeggios. The only place the view of the city was interrupted was where Marilyn – the blank reverse of her, girdered, engineered and supported with metal struts – creaked and rattled back and forth through the night, blocking our view completely every ten seconds or so.
Mama Strawberry was sitting at a reproduction Louis Quatorze gilded desk just in front of the Marilyn swing, smoking from her elaborate cigarette-holder and punching numbers into a calculator. Not far from her was a table where the hostesses sat, waiting to be assigned to a customer, smoking and chattering – twenty of us, all Japanese with the exception of me and the twins. Irina had given me a handful of Sobranie ‘Pinks’ cigarettes and I sat in silence, smoking intently, looking warily across the club at the aluminium doors where the customers would arrive.
Eventually the lift bell pinged and a large party of suited men came through the aluminium doors. ‘She’s going to put you with them,’ Irina whispered, sliding up to me, her hand held to the side of her mouth. ‘These ones, they always leave the tip. For their favourite girls. Mama gonna watch and see if you get tip. This is your test, bay-beee!’
I was summoned, discreetly, along with the Russians and three Japanese hostesses, and sent to a table next to the panoramic window, where we stood formally with our hands resting lightly on the chair backs waiting for the men to cross the polished parquet floor. I copied the others, stepping agitatedly from foot to foot, wishing I could tug my skirt down. A string of waiters appeared from nowhere, hurriedly setting the table with piles of snowy white linen, a silver candlestick, gleaming glasses, finishing just as the men arrived and seated themselves, pulling back chairs and unbuttoning jackets.
‘ Irasshaimase,’ said the Japanese girls, bowing, and sliding into the chairs, taking hot towels from the bamboo dish that appeared on the table.
‘Welcome,’ I mumbled, taking my cue from the others.
A bottle of champagne and some Scotch appeared. I shuffled my chair forward and sat, glancing at everyone, waiting to see what to do next. The girls were slitting the hot towels from their wrappers, unfolding them into the men’s waiting hands, so I quickly copied, dropping one into the hands of the man on my left. He didn’t acknowledge me. He took the towel, wiped his hands, dropped it carelessly on the table in front of me, and turned away to speak to the hostess on his other side. The rules were clear: my job was to light cigarettes, pour whisky, feed the men finger food and entertain them. No sex. Just conversation and flattery. It was all printed out for the new girls to read on a laminated card. ‘Better you say something funny,’ Mama Strawberry had whispered to me. ‘Strawberry’s customers want to relax.’
‘Hallo,’ Svetlana said boldly, settling her bottom into one of the seats, dwarfing the men, moving from side to side like a broody hen so that everyone had to make room. She picked up a glass from the centre of the table and chimed it against the bottle. ‘Shampansky, darlink. So nice!’ She unloaded the entire bottle into four glasses then waggled the empty bottle above her head to summon the waiter for more.
The men seemed to like the twins, they kept singing tunes to them that must have been from TV or radio because I didn’t recognize them: ‘“Double the pleasure, double the fun… Give me that little LIFT. Come and get you SOME!”’ Everyone would laugh and applaud and the conversation, in a mixture of Japanese and broken English, would take off again. The twins got drunk very quickly. Svetlana’s eye makeup was smudged and Irina kept jumping up to light the men’s cigarettes with a disposable Thai Air lighter, leaning across the table, knocking over the little bowls of seaweed and dried cuttlefish. ‘Don’t make me laugh,’ she squealed, when someone told a joke. She was flushed and slurring. ‘Make me laugh some more and I explode!’