Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

The woman who is being paid to flirt with me is very good.

She's sitting in front of me, batting her eyelashes and playing with the translucent boa that hangs around her neck. She wears a form-fitting, purplish-red dress that looks like a prom outfit from a sultry alternate reality. Her eyelashes reach up and out, exaggerating her blinks and laughs. Those eyelashes can’t be real.

“You’re very handsome,” she says, leaning slightly toward me. I’m not inclined to argue. At that exact moment in time, I certainly feel very handsome.  

But there are complications.  

"This is Saleem,” a girl at my table says, introducing me. “And this girl sitting next to him is his girlfriend."  

"Oh, my," says the professional flirt-ress. "That's too bad."  

I am in the International Show Pub Asiana, in downtown Kumamoto, Japan, one of the many evening clubs where wealthy men pay a premium to enjoy the company of beautiful young women. Hostesses sit at the club’s six tables, providing company to the patrons, who are mostly gray-haired Japanese businessmen. The girls compliment them and laugh at their jokes. There may be some handholding. It may be hard to believe, given that in the most expensive clubs men can easily spend hundreds of dollars in a few hours, but handholding is where it stops.  

I am here with my girlfriend (who is Japanese) and a group of her friends, one of whom knows a hostess who has let us in for cheap. Women don't usually visit these clubs, but my girlfriend and her friends are having a kind of girls’ night out—with me. It's my first time in a lounge, and I'm here out of courtesy. And, yes, curiosity.   

Around me, patrons chat one-on-one with hostesses in cushy booths that could easily seat four. The color-filtered light fixtures cast a kind of muted purple light that, coupled with tons of makeup, make everyone's skin look flawless. To me, the place feels fake—like it’s been engineered to give men an escape from their everyday lives and to give them the chance to be surrounded by beautiful women who feign interest in them. It’s a lounge of illusion.  

I watch the professional flirt-ress chat with my girlfriend. Her conversation keeps turning back to my handsomeness. As she talks, she glances at me and fidgets suggestively with her scarf. I want to tell her, "Hey, it's cool. You don't have to flirt with me. I'm in on the joke. You're not actually in love with me, I get it." But I also get the impression that she can't turn off the charm. Maybe it's a work rule, or maybe it's the force of habit.  

She is very pretty. 

The manager of the lounge approaches our table. “There will be a karaoke contest starting soon,” she says. “There will be lots of prizes." Then, looking directly at me: "Why don't you join?” 

“No, no, that's OK,” I say. "I'm fine just watching." But my tablemates are enthusiastic and insist that I sing. I begin flipping through a book of thousands of songs, and choose Little Richard's 1955 hit, Tutti Frutti. (I don’t know why, but Tutti Frutti is the song I always sing at karaoke. I've rocked it at my high school graduation party, at a suburban bar in North Carolina, and in many private Japanese karaoke rooms. I'm not good at many things, but I straight up kill when it comes to Tutti Frutti.)  

A moment later, the first contestant—one of the businessmen—steps onto the stage. He takes the microphone and one of the hostesses grabs his hand. He begins to sing a type of melancholy Japanese ballad called enka.   

He finishes and receives a polite round of applause from the audience. The next contestant—another businessman—rises and is accompanied by another hostess. He, too, sings a melancholy enka song.  

"Um, is everyone singing enka?" I ask my tablemates.  

"Probably," they say. None of them have ever heard of Tutti Frutti.  

I'm starting to get nervous. From the moment I entered the lounge, I have been concerned about killing the vibe for the other male patrons. They have paid good money to be here, to sing and be applauded by beautiful women. Now, a foreigner with a female entourage is about to sing Tutti Frutti. If enka is a night alone with a bottle of wine, then Tutti Frutti is a trip to the playground with 20 school kids, Pop Rocks, and Coca-Cola. It’s loud, American, and embarrassing.  

The song appears on the karaoke monitor, and a hostess accompanies me to the stage. As the first notes of Tutti Frutti come on, a terrifying thought occurs to me: Maybe I'm not so good at singing Tutti Frutti after all. Maybe, when I sang this song in high school, I actually embarrassed myself, and have been deluding myself ever since.

But it’s too late now. I start to sing, all out.  

“A wop-bop-a-loo-mop alop-bom-bom… Tutti Frutti!”

The manager leads the club in adjusting to the new vibe, frantically mashing buttons on her switchboard. A disco ball lights up, flooding the room with flickering colored lights. The hostesses, as if on cue, start dancing and laughing, switching into party mood as quickly as a Bollywood scene change. The male clientele stays seated at first, but the hostesses start pulling some of them away from their tables, holding their hands and swinging their arms in time to the music. After some initial reluctance, the men start to get into it.  

Back at my table, the girls-night-out crowd is laughing and dancing, my girlfriend among them. I have long since abandoned the hostess who escorted me to the stage in favor of the microphone, and she has joined the general party.

And, suddenly, it's one of the greatest moments I've had in Japan.

The hostesses are having so much fun, I think. I haven't killed the vibe. In fact, I am just the guy they’ve been waiting for—they needed someone to mix things up, to really get the party started. Every time the hostesses look at me, it's big smiles and laughter and hand-clapping happiness. They are tired of the usual guests and are ecstatic to have a young guy like me in the joint, livening things up.  

Or not. They are professionals, so it's hard to know.  

I lean back with the mic in the air like some kind of rock star blessing the club with my presence. I sing my heart out. In the lounge of illusion, I choose to believe.