Today’s
guest blog is by Susanna Quinn whose debut novel Glass Geisha’s is published today.
Glass Geisha’s is the tale of
Steph who comes to Japan to work as a bar hostess but finds herself involved in
something much deeper and darker.
Let
me take you into Tokyo’s red-light district, where women are waiting to massage
you with their naked bodies. Walk amid
prostitutes in school uniforms and nurse outfits, and wander into fake subway
stations where men pay to ‘molest’ women.
Buy a cup of coffee from a waitress wearing no knickers, and then pay
her for sex at the back of the cafe.
What
else will you find, amid all this weird and wonderful sex for sale? Crime.
Not just petty theft or vandalism, but hard, violent crime. Drug wars, violent robbery and murder.
Gangsters
run Tokyo’s sex district and make money from the girls – just as they do in
every other big city all over the world.
They sell the girls drugs, beat them when they misbehave and make sure
it’s near impossible for them to go back to a normal life.
Sex
and crime have always gone together – in books and in real life. Where there is sex for sale, there is
violence, theft and murder. Moreover,
all of these things fascinate us.
Here
is what I don’t understand. Sex is
supposed to be a pleasant, relaxing act, so why is selling it often connected
with the very worst sorts of criminals? I’m
talking about people who will, without remorse, shoot someone in the head and
throw their body in front of a subway train.
The
prostitutes I met in Tokyo were often drug addicts, and almost always had
violent, gangster boyfriends who beat them.
Why did they associate with the very worst sorts of criminals, when
their only crime was making men happy for half an hour, and charging for the
privilege?
Is
it because, deep down, we still think sex is dirty and wrong? The girls who sell sex feel so bad about
themselves, they believe they’re as bad as men who murder and torture others? Sure, selling sex is against the law in most
places. But so is banking fraud. That doesn’t mean it has to be associated
with violent crime.
I
didn’t start out to write a crime novel, and in fact, Glass Geishas doesn’t have a detective or a conventional crime plot. I worked in the Tokyo
Let
me quickly explain what a hostess is. A
hostess is a sort of modern-day geisha, and western hostesses are in high
demand. They pour men’s drinks, offer
flirtatious conversation and sing karaoke.
That’s it – supposedly. But
hostess clubs are almost always in sex districts and, truth be told, some
hostesses do end up having sex with their customers.
I
wanted to write about a British girl working as a hostess in the Tokyo sex
district, and after wrangling with many different storylines, they all came
back to one thing. Crime. That’s what I saw in the sex district, and I
always wanted to write the truth.
While
I worked in Japan
The
answer was societal disapproval. If I
had sex with someone for money, I’d always be carrying a sort of ‘shame’ that
I’d done something most people saw as really wrong.
But
why? Where’s the shame? Is it any different from giving someone a
massage, or bathing someone who can’t bath themselves? In terms of the impact it has on people,
prostitution isn’t half as bad as being a loan shark or a millionaire tax
dodger. Who does it hurt?
One
of the worst things you could ever say about a woman is that she had sex with
someone for money. Selling sex is
apparently so awful that you can be sent to prison for it. But it wasn’t prison that bothered me. It was the fact that for my whole life I’d be
tarnished by society – seen as a certain sort of girl.
Japan
actually has quite a laid-back attitude to sex.
It’s not seen as dirty or embarrassing.
It’s generally accepted that people will have their fetishes, which may
involve – say – schoolgirls or molesting women on subway trains, and as long as
no one is hurt we should live and let live.
However,
girls working in the sex industry are still frowned upon. Nice girls don’t work in the mizu shobai (the water trade – the
Japanese term for the nightclub industry).
Just like the rest of the world, there are the girls you marry, and the
girls you don’t. Selling sex for money
makes you a girl no one would ever marry.
When
I worked in Japan, I saw ‘nice’ girls make the transition from hostess to
prostitute. They did it because after
years of working in the Tokyo
Once
they made the cross over, they became part of the criminal underworld – a world
where it’s always nighttime, and money seems to grow on the fluorescent-lit
buildings that climb into dark, polluted skies.
One minute you have a million yen in your pocket, the next you’ve spent
it all on champagne, cocaine and designer labels and you feel worthless again.
Life
is cheap, and people don’t live long. I
never met a girl who chose to be part of this world – they were always sucked
or dragged into it. Sleep with someone
for money once, and society sees you as cheap and worthless forever. When the world sees you as worthless, it
doesn’t take long to think of yourself that way, and that’s the ultimate trap.
Why
is selling sex still a crime? I truly
have no idea. What I do know is that our
attitude to prostitutes – the fact we think of them as slightly less than human
– ruins lives, and perhaps that’s the biggest crime of all.
Glass Geishas is published as a paperback original and
eBook by Hodder & Stoughton on the 7th June 2012, £7.99
More information about Susanna Quinn can be found at her website www.bookgroupbooks.com
One of the surprising things is that this attitude towards sex-for-money seems to exist in every culture. However, in many cultures there are women, often called courtesans, who do much the same thing but are highly regarded. What makes them different?
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