In addition, a top hostess might receive perks: an apartment subsidized by her most besotted customer; dinners at the best restaurants in Japan; presents of designer clothes, jewelry and computers; trips around the world; or, perhaps most tantalizing, a sponsor who allows her to circumvent Japan’s strict visa laws and remain in the country.

Of the six months I worked in the business, I made my highest salary for just a couple of them. This was about three months into the job, by which time I had my own customers, and still gave a damn about the job. More important, I was still having fun then, and my obvious enjoyment made me popular.

From the beginning, I made fairly good money, and even picked up two non-hostess jobs through my customers. One man recommended a female friend who needed a private English tutor, and another man, the head of a hair accessories company, paid me very well to spend an afternoon modeling his barrettes and bobby pins.

It’s not unusual for hostesses to locate business opportunities through their more trusted customers. Mr. Kobayashi, the politician turned consultant, offered several times to help me with my academic career. Exactly how he could do this was unclear, but he repeatedly stated his indebtedness to the hostessing system for his own success.

He told me, “The mama-san of a famous hostess club in Ginza was as responsible for my career as anyone else. She introduced me to people I needed to know in politics, and she didn’t even charge me her full prices until I was making enough money.”

She undoubtedly did this because she knew that Mr. Kobayashi would one day be a high-placed official who would bring lots of business to her club by entertaining clients there. Her help had instilled in him an appreciation of the practical, corporate aspect of hostessing. Mr. Kobayashi viewed hostesses as colleagues, in a way, since they helped him with his clients.

But most men don’t hold so respectful a view of the girls they toast with such high-priced whiskey. There is a dark side to this profession, a high price you might have to pay for temporarily living the life of a supermodel. It took me a few months to fully realize this. Some of the worst dangers are to the hostess’s physical health — the late working hours, physical exhaustion and heavy drinking do take a toll.

Drinking alcohol is unavoidable. While Verdor, unlike many clubs, didn’t have a drink-back system (wherein customers must buy hostesses ridiculously priced drinks and the girls get a cut of the bill), there was still a lot of pressure on hostesses to get tipsy. In hopes of making them livelier, the club required even girls who claimed to have health problems that prohibited them from drinking to have at least one glass of alcohol before the waiter would switch their drinks to orange juice or iced tea.

The customers’ logic is not so different from that of young men at a fraternity party: Get the girl drunk and maybe you’ll get laid. I frequently heard customers asking the waiter to make a girl’s drink strong, and I’ve seen hostesses continue to be served long after they had become completely drunk. For women who stay in the business for years, alcoholism is a pernicious threat.

One of the girls who worked a couple of nights a week at Verdor was Audrey, a 20-year-old part-time model from Indiana who walked the runways for Marc Jacobs by day and got plastered as a hostess by night. With her obnoxious accent and brash but sweet disposition, she was the kind of girl not every customer likes but who, for those who do, can be a fatal attraction. Her customers were obsessed with her. One of them told me, after Audrey had stumbled into the restroom, that he worried about her. “Please help her,” he urged me.

Maybe he honestly believed in his concern when he said this, but it was an ironic request, considering that he — like all of Audrey’s customers — was doing his best to get her drunk. I think they found her almost unbearably touching when, after ripping through a couple of Janis Joplin songs, she lost consciousness.

Audrey, in the customers’ defense, was a willing victim. While Verdor didn’t have a drink-back system, girls who introduced new customers to the club (whom they’d usually met while working elsewhere) always got a cut of that customer’s bill, and this man was Audrey’s customer. That was why she was on her third bottle of champagne.

By the end of the night she had made, in addition to her regular salary, a bonus of $350 — 10 percent of the customer’s bill. But to do this she’d had to consume four bottles of the best champagne by herself. She passed out on one of Verdor’s velvet couches and slept there for about an hour, until she was able to walk upstairs to her cab.

Even through this sort of debauchery, one of the best — and most unusual — things about Verdor was that the girls generally supported one another. I liked Audrey, so I tried to talk to her. I knew she felt a bond with me, the only other American at Verdor. “You have to stop drinking so much. It’s not healthy,” I told her.

“Yeah, I know, Berkeley” (she had nicknamed me this after my graduate school), “but they keep serving me even when I’m already drunk.”

“Then you just have to stop yourself.”

“I know,” she said sadly, looking much older than her years at that moment. After two years in Japan, she returned to America last May, a few weeks before me. I hope she stays there.

Besides alcohol, hard drugs — because of the late hours, the emotional pressure and the women’s large disposable income — are also a popular and accessible option. I wondered at Sandra’s shrill thinness until I found out that she snorted cocaine in the immaculate club restroom before returning to the velvet couches to drink with her many customers.

One day I noticed that Mr. Hayashi, previously one of her steady patrons, had stopped coming. “Did something happen?” I asked her.

“Oh,” she grimaced. “I had a little problem with him. We haven’t talked since I introduced him to my boyfriend.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Well … Look, you can’t tell anyone, but Hayashi is really into his drugs. I knew that my boyfriend could get him some coke, so I set up a meeting between the two of them. After that, Hayashi wanted me to party with him, but I’m trying to get out of that whole scene, so I refused.”

“And you haven’t seen him since?” I asked.

Sandra nodded. I was sorry for her loss of a customer, but at least she was trying to stop her drug use.

In addition to the physical dangers, the stress on looks in the hostess profession increases the likelihood of self-image disorders like anorexia and bulimia. I had suffered and recovered from anorexia in junior high school, and even with that horrific experience in mind, I found myself worrying about my weight for the first time since then — something I hadn’t even done in high school when I was seriously dancing ballet. I’m 5-foot-10 and wear a size 6, and that seemed big to a lot of Japanese men. Some girls, though undeniably thin by American standards, nevertheless started dieting when customers reacted with surprise to their sexy curves — hips not being a prominent feature of the bodies of most young Japanese women.

What’s more, hostesses have to cope with a certain amount of obnoxious behavior on the part of customers. Because they’re paying for your company, some of them wrongly assume intellectual superiority. Fortunately, because I became the favorite of several of Midori’s most important (read: richest) customers, my popularity protected me against customers who became unruly when drunk or were just generally rude. I had, at least, the option of asking to be moved to a different table in difficult situations, and my request was sometimes (but not always) granted.

The constant competition can also wear on you. At Verdor there wasn’t much cat fighting and back stabbing, mostly because the girls were too cash rich, or exhausted by work, to care. (None of us could fall asleep before sunrise, so after work we would often take our customers’ tips and go out together for a bite to eat or dancing for the rest of the night.) Occasionally, however, a customer would decide it was time for a switch of girls, often when his most recent favorite was on vacation.

Like other hostesses, I felt some competitive pressure whenever I was seated, at Midori’s discretion, with one of my customers and another girl. The other hostess would try her best to entertain him, of course, since that was her job, and even if she wasn’t purposely trying to steal him, she couldn’t help it if he transferred some of his interest from me to her.

Toward the end of my tenure at Verdor, for example, I was forced to share Mr. Kajiwara, one of my favorite customers, with another hostess — a loss I registered more on an emotional than a financial plane, as he alternated his dinners out with me and her. Even in a world of illusion, rejection — on whatever level — still hurts.

Perhaps the worst-case scenario is of the hostess who becomes trapped in this environment, addicted to the fleeting adulation of men and convinced she can do nothing else. One hostess I knew was an absolutely gorgeous, 37-year-old Brazilian woman who had made a killing when she first came to Japan 15 years before. Now, even her beauty couldn’t make up for the fact that she was getting older — an unforgivable sin in the world of hostessing — and her salary was fast decreasing. She spoke six languages and had a degree in architecture, yet she still felt like she couldn’t leave this job. Maybe cases like this are the reason many customers said to me, “What are you doing in a place like this? Get out while you can.”

Despite all its peculiarities, I became increasingly addicted to the hostess world, which was intoxicating in more than one sense of the word. I found it impossible to quit, even though my tenure as a hostess had already served its purpose. After a few months, I had made enough money to be able to return to grad school comfortably in the black. What’s more, hostessing was proving to be counterproductive to other goals I had, primarily studying and performing avant-garde Japanese dance, since my nocturnal work schedule conflicted with most rehearsals and classes.

But I couldn’t stop. I think the main reason had to do with the “true” relationship in my life, which was suffering from my boyfriend’s and my cohabitation. I felt that my customers could somehow protect me from the emotional wounds inflicted by my lover. Their adoration validated me, so I didn’t have to rely on my real relationship for self-esteem. This armor, I thought, might be what could save the love I cared about.

I was still living in a dream world at this point, but I couldn’t help realizing the moral ambiguity of my position. For a while, a when-in-Rome attitude kept me going. In the beginning, I just told myself that the hostess/geisha system was centuries old, and that the men who were my clients well knew how it worked. If they became too emotionally involved and got hurt, that was their problem, because they couldn’t have had any illusions about the situation at Verdor — a place that was all illusion.

This was how most of the hostesses around me felt, especially the ones who had been in the business a long time. One night, after carefully explaining how she was plotting to manipulate her best customer to get more money out of him, Amanda — a highly educated hostess — sighed, then shrugged. “I was never like this before. But this is the game you have to play. I make a lot of money and get to travel the world. That’s what’s important to me now.”

I played the same game for a time: I plotted which customer to call when; calculated how to portray myself as a romantic possibility to the men while keeping my distance; memorized my customers’ likes and dislikes as to karaoke, drinks, conversation and dress.

In the spring, after hostessing for a total of five-and-a-half months, I started to break down, snapping at customers when they became condescending or lewd. “How big is your vagina?” a new customer might ask, demonstrating various sizes with his fingers.

“How big is your penis? Pretty small, I bet,” I’d retort.

“What?” The great thing about being rude is that the men can’t, at first, believe that they’re hearing insults from you. As the paying customers, they expect to be treated as deferentially as gods. So they assume, if you’re speaking English, that they haven’t heard you correctly and, if you’re speaking Japanese, that you’ve just made a mistake. But eventually they get it.

One time I snapped at a customer right in front of the club manager. He didn’t reprimand me afterward, though he looked less than pleased. His silence surprised me at first, but I soon guessed what was up: Midori’s two most important customers were crazy about me. Until my erratic behavior became a huge liability, the manager couldn’t really do anything to me. I had at least that power.

But pretty soon I was crying regularly on the way home from work, as sympathetic taxi drivers tried to comfort me. I yearned for the day when I could return to the safe if laborious world of graduate school (that’s when you know you’re desperate). At first the job had made me stronger and more self-confident, but now I realized it was just making my heart harder.

It was also changing me in ways I was unable to see. One night I went out for drinks with a male friend I had known for years, and I realized that he was looking at me with horror. “What?” I asked. As soon as we started talking, he told me, everything about my comportment changed: My voice became lower, my movements more languid, my laugh more provocative.

It wasn’t that I was trying to seduce him; it was just that my hostessing persona had become so second nature that it overcame me whenever I was in a similar environment. Spooked, I felt like I had been possessed by a demon temptress. The lines between my work self and my “normal” self were blurring. I liked being able to toy with different personae, but I needed to be able to control them.

I knew there was a real problem when my boyfriend, a South American Casanova with no short list of past lovers, told me that I had a problem with commitment. “What do you want from me?” I retorted. “It’s my job to pretend that I’m in love with a different man every night!”

During my painful breakup with this man, I relied on my customers for a great deal of emotional support and validation — even though they knew nothing about my personal life. Their sham “love” soothed the wounds of heartbreak, especially because I knew the fantasy that was my work held no danger for my heart.

My customers reminded me, in true Buddhist fashion, that the passions of this world really are an illusion. This was a valuable lesson. Now I feel better able to continue with school — I think I can take it all a little less seriously and a bit more pleasurably.

Finally, however, I couldn’t deny what I had known for a while: Hostessing was no longer worth doing. It had started as well-paid glamour, but it had become a nightmare in which my customers and I tried to outwit each other through a fake courtship. I pretended that I loved them so I could get money, and they pretended that they loved me so they could get sex. They would be content with innocent companionship only for so long, and I figured I might as well get out before I lost all of them. I dreaded failing at even so pathetic a profession as hostessing. So I quit, telling Midori I had to return to school in California.

I really did care about my customers in my own way. And I confess that I miss hostessing sometimes. It was like a dream — perfect at its height, restless and nightmarish near daybreak. I still get e-mails from several of my customers. They tell me how much they miss me, how they have no one to talk to since I left, how they get nostalgic when they hear certain songs on the karaoke system. Their notes, at once absurd and sincere, touch me. I write them back when I can, because I can’t just leave them to their loneliness. I feel that it’s still my job to look after them, even from far away.

To my own disbelief, I took one last stab at the whole thing last fall, in America. Call me a glutton for exquisite servitude. Mr. Tanaka, one of my former customers, came to Los Angeles for an annual aviation conference. I accepted his offer to fly me to L.A. for the weekend and put me up at the Bonaventure. Just to be safe, I took along a male friend and stashed him in my bathroom whenever Tanaka knocked on the door. Although such capers provided some comic relief, I was miserable for most of the two days. Hostessing just did not translate into my own culture, and I spent much of the weekend wondering what the other men at the conference thought my position was. Luckily, Tanaka was a perfect gentleman. And he never discovered my stowaway.

Even with that failed experiment, I still occasionally miss the sweet deception and intensity of hostessing, the experience of a love affair stripped clean of any mundane concerns. The relationship between a hostess and her customer is commitment without complications, magic without disappointments. But ultimately, though hostessing can make ordinary love seem less exciting, it also highlights how tender less manipulated relationships can be, and how much more redemptive.

Maybe someday I could hostess again, but I doubt it. Being in love with one person is hard enough. And maybe it is enough, after all.

As one former hostess, now a mama-san, put it, “If you’re good at what you do, you don’t have sex with them. You don’t have to.”

But, as with love in general, hostessing isn’t that simple. Not anymore, at least. For some time now, the geisha has been considered far too expensive for even a moderately wealthy customer. But now hostess clubs like Verdor are also being crossed off the list of budget watchers. Men who could afford it nevertheless whined about the prices at Verdor.

This frugality is a relatively recent development, and it especially affects foreign hostesses. Unlike a decade ago in Japan, postmodern Holly Golightlys can no longer hope to make $1,000 just for showing up for dinner with bleached-blond hair.

The change is the result of altered expectations as much as financial pressures. While Verdor, like the geisha system of old, still stresses the importance of long-term patrons, simpler and cheaper options — like One Eyed Jack and Harlem Night — are popping up everywhere. They have an assembly-line hostessing style that aims for short-term satisfaction rather than commitment. After all, why pay $200 per hour for conversation if you can get a peep show — and more — for far less? The tastes of the average Japanese consumer are changing, along with his fantasies. If he’s going to drop big money, he wants to get all he can — and I’m not talking about good haiku.

Because of this, the high-class hostess, like her proverbial stepmother the geisha, is becoming a thing of the past. I didn’t realize this at first, but it hit me at the same time my fantasy of being a sophisticated but nonsexual companion was finally shattered. I did not want to sell sex; I wanted to sell its most alluring fantasy. But fantasies just aren’t enough in Japan these days.

Even in a refined place like Verdor, the men are still men. Highly common is the customer who, though gentlemanly when sober, becomes all hands when drunk. While such behavior is in principle frowned upon at a place like Verdor, it’s the hostess’s job, rather than the mama-san’s or the manager’s, to control it, usually by laughing and scolding the customer like a naughty child: “Bad, bad boy.” But that tactic sometimes arouses the men even more, since many of them are there to be babied.

Others are sneaky and plot carefully to steal a kiss or a touch from their favorite girl. Sherry, one of my co-workers, realized this too late when her customer took her to O-Daiba, an amusement park on a small island south of Tokyo — though she was a little suspicious of his urgency to get on the Ferris wheel and his purchase of a bottle of wine with a twist-off cap.

Sure enough, once the Ferris wheel — one of the tallest in the world, which takes an hour to make one revolution — started moving, he pounced on her. Sherry knew that she was trapped for the next hour, and he knew it too, so she tried her best to distract him from his groping with frantic conversation. “It was the longest hour of my life,” she told me. When I related the story to another customer, he enviously remarked, “What a good idea! Trapped her on the Ferris wheel!” I can guess where he took his next unsuspecting hostess.

I never got stuck on an amusement park ride with a lustful customer, but I did have some problems in taxis. Men who stayed at the club until closing often offered to give me a ride home, and since taxis in Japan cost about four times those in the U.S., I’d usually take them up on their offer. Sometimes they’d invite me to stop for a bite to eat or a drink on the way home. To get out of any side trips, I’d tell them I was really tired or that I had to study the next day.

One night I shared a taxi with one of my most devoted customers, who had been a perfect gentleman so far. When the car stopped at the house I shared with my boyfriend, he grabbed me and kissed me. He was much stronger than I would have thought a 60-year-old could be. I pulled away and ran inside, but I still had to call him the next day to thank him for dinner. He asked me if he could take me to Disneyland in Tokyo that weekend. “I’m not feeling so well,” I told him. In fact, I did feel a little sick to my stomach — I was disappointed in him and in my profession.

An executive at Shiseido cosmetics company had a more straightforward way of getting a kiss or caress from his favorite hostesses: He negotiated with makeup samples. “One kiss, one lipstick. One touch, five lipsticks,” he said to me with a straight face.

“You can’t be serious,” I balked.

“Oh, yes. Shiseido is a very good product. Girls like very much. You want?”

“Sorry, the shades don’t match my skin tone.”

In spite of such exchanges, I still held out hope that the elegance of the floating world was alive and well somewhere.

I liked the fact that Verdor’s richest customers stopped at geisha clubs in Akasaka before coming to our place. I thought this testified to their cultured tastes. Some proudly sang the old geisha songs they had learned during the time of extravagant patronage.

When I asked one of these men what had made him give up the company of the treasured geisha to come hang out with us, he told me, “If I stayed there any longer I’d get too drunk! Geisha are real alcoholics, and they make you play too many drinking games. And they always win. Here I can relax!”

This man, one of Midori’s biggest spenders, had enthroned my friend Sandra and me as his favorites. He was an old hand at being the top client of a hostess club, and he knew how to create a scene if we weren’t seated with him as soon as he arrived. He took turns squeezing both of our waists and singing folk songs. Small, dapper and white-haired, he seemed harmless enough, even sweet — until he started propositioning me.

“You can become my mistress, earn very good money in a short time,” he told me.

He repeatedly offered me $20,000 to sleep with him — a high figure, but not out of line with the sums that get thrown around in such places. Men know that women in the top-notch clubs, particularly North American and Western European hostesses, aren’t likely to be won over with a small amount of money. Having been a hostess for several months by this point, I had to admire his realistic attitude. (At least he knew a young woman wasn’t going to lust after a man three times her age without some monetary incentive.)

But my final answer every time he broached the subject was “No.”

He also made overtures to Sandra, who was a more practical type. “Look, Cynthia, it would be over in about five minutes. Maybe we could even get him to go higher.”

“Higher?”

“By offering to both sleep with him at once.” She was serious about this. The way she described the hypothetical scene with this little snow-haired man was actually pretty comical. But in the end I just couldn’t do it. It seemed too absurd — a grandfather paying two young girls a small fortune for an ephemeral pleasure. This wasn’t the dream I wanted to create for this man or anyone else.

Yet the offer did give me a pleasant feeling. I was amused that I could have become a sort of “bodhisattva whore,” one of the saintly courtesans famous in Japanese literature for enlightening their paying lovers by teaching them about the instability of love and the human body. Certainly, my powers to empathize had grown since I’d started working in Japan. To be a successful hostess, after all, you have to be a little bit in love with your customers as you sit next to them, paid to smile and flatter and dream in unison. Or you have to be a little drunk.

I talked Sandra out of accepting the big spender’s offer for the time being, but when I left Japan, she was again considering his proposal. “To talk about it is one thing; it’s another thing to do it,” she admitted. She wasn’t in desperate need of money, so my guess is that she probably didn’t go through with it. But who knows — stranger things have happened to nice girls in that kind of place.

I know of only one girl at a top hostess club who did exchange sex for money. Amy was a New Zealander who worked for Toni, my friend’s Spanish mama-san. Amy kept quiet about her transactions of the flesh. Clearly she was smart, but her careful plans were spoiled when Toni discovered what she was doing.

Toni was furious and felt that Amy’s behavior was jeopardizing her business. And it was true that after they got what they wanted, at least two customers stopped coming to the club. (Their sudden departures were what tipped off Toni about Amy’s extracurricular activities.)

Toni couldn’t afford to lose even one customer. What might have helped Amy in the short term was destructive for Toni’s longevity in the business. The hostess, after all, is a metonym of the mama-san, and Amy’s behavior reflected badly on Toni. It cheapened her image. Toni fired Amy, and no one seemed to know what happened to her after that.

Unlike Amy, most foreign hostesses walk the fine line between decorative commodity and near prostitute, thinking little of it. Perhaps this is because in Japan — where foreigners are called “gaijin,” meaning “outsiders” — visitors are already relegated to the margins of society. When you’re such a marginal figure, everything is up for grabs.

Next: Addicted to love, but the bad outweighs the good.

This is pretty typical. The vast majority of my customers were married and claimed that their wives didn’t mind their visits to Verdor. When I asked why, one explained, perhaps too hopefully: “If we came straight home after work, we’d still have all the tension of the workday with us. This kind of a place allows us to get rid of our bad energy before we go home, so our wives are grateful for that.”

Mr. Kobayashi had a more pragmatic take on the situation: “My wife is happy with our relationship: I go out and work, and she stays at home and takes care of the money.”

“So she wouldn’t mind if you had an affair with a hostess?” I asked him.

“She and I have an agreement. If she ever catches me having an affair, I have to give her 100,000 yen — about $1,000. I think she prays that I’ll get a girlfriend!”

Customers often take time away from their wives to see a hostess. A loyal customer expects to occasionally meet his hostess on the weekend for dinner or an excursion outside of Tokyo. Favorite destinations are the ancient capital of Kyoto and the snow festivals of Hokkaido, Tokyo, Disneyland and even high-end strip clubs (to watch, not participate, as my friend Sandra, who went to a club called Seventh Heaven with one of her more eccentric customers, informed me).

While these outings are nominally fun, there is always an aspect of work to them, because you can never appear to be tired or less than completely enthralled.

Some customers pay for the hostess’s time during these outings. Mr. Mori paid me $500 to go with him, dressed in French couture and enthusiastic smiles that made my face ache, to see the plum blossoms at one of Japan’s most famous gardens, located an hour outside of Tokyo in his hometown of Mito.

Originally he’d asked me to stay the night in Mito. I had refused, giving a dance class the next morning as my excuse. But he wasn’t offering to put me up in a hotel: He was inviting me to spend the night at the house he shared with his wife. “She’s very excited to meet you.”

I was a little taken aback. “Mrs. Mori doesn’t mind?”

“No. I told her how interested you were in Japanese literature. And that you are my English teacher,” he joked, citing a common cover job for a hostess in Tokyo.

“So she doesn’t know where we met?”

“Oh, she does.”

Instead of reassuring me, this conversation just made the situation more alarming. I told him I’d have to take the evening train back for my class. He still gave me the money for accompanying him to view the plum trees. Some men negotiate with hostesses about a weekend “time charge” for their company, but not, in most cases, for any sexual favors.

Not all of the men who frequented clubs were married. Two of my younger customers were still single, and an older one, Mr. Tanaka, a former test pilot, had vowed never to marry after the fiancée of his youth left him, frightened away by his perilous job. He regretted this decision and was lonely. The hostess club truly was his family now, with Midori as the matriarch and her hostesses part daughters, part lovers. He genuinely wanted to help us — as a financial patron and loving uncle — but he desired us too. As he said to Midori about both me and Amanda, “They are like daughters, but also like yama no kami” — using a humorous term for “wife” in Japanese that literally means “goddess of the mountain.”

As for my younger single customers, 32-year-old Mr. Suzuki was convinced, despite the fact that he never saw me on my own time, that I would eventually marry him. He had been coming to clubs for 10 years, and although he must have known on some level that paying a woman to spend time with him wasn’t the ideal basis for matrimony, he still persisted in his suit. “I am from a samurai family. I’d be a good husband,” he assured me.

I initially played along with his delusions, for the benefit of my job. While I never accepted his proposals, neither did I come right out and say that I wouldn’t be his wife. Gradually, however, I began to feel guilty, because of his obvious mental instability. When I finally told him flat out that I wouldn’t marry him, or even kiss him, he dropped me and disappeared from the club, undoubtedly to continue his search for a wife in another venue.

Of course, such establishments hold little attraction for most young men, married or not. Leftovers from a bygone age when decorum was paramount, Verdor and clubs like it are largely patronized by old men — very rich old men. Especially in the current Japanese economy, when customers are far less likely than in the past to be on expense accounts, only the wealthiest can afford to drop nearly $1,000 for several hours of (more or less) pristine conversation.

Even if the company isn’t paying, men still often come with their co-workers. In Japan, business has often been conducted after hours, in the presence of well-coifed women, who are thought to make businessmen feel more relaxed and generous than they would in a boardroom. But even if they are not conducting business, customers are apt to bring office cronies along. In Japan men spend far more time with co-workers and hostesses than they do with their wives and families.

Mr. Murakami, one of Midori’s best customers, inevitably dragged along with him, as his personal sidekick and straight man, Mr. Tawa, the president of one of the several companies he owned. While his right-hand man was made to sing Elvis Presley numbers, this septuagenarian would grab the girl nearest to him, spin her across the dance floor and ask loudly, “You want me? I send you to heaven! Not very big, but very hard. Many girls say so!” By the end of the night Murakami would be collapsed in a drunken stupor. Apparently heaven would have to wait.

The hostesses felt bad for Tawa, whose job was roughly equivalent to ours: He had to fawn over Murakami, laugh at his jokes, agree with his boasts and sing on request. Despite the fact that he was a president himself, the rules of Japanese hierarchy made it such that he was reduced to the role of a near pimp, for it was Tawa who called hostesses on weekends to see if we’d like to join Murakami on his yacht. (“No, thank you.”)

Other men use hostesses to try to impress their co-workers. Mr. Kajiwara secretly invited three junior employees to join our douhan. It was technically against the rules, because if he wanted me to entertain his cohorts, Midori would have preferred that it happen at the club, where they would all have to pay. But I didn’t mind because I liked Kajiwara as a friend, finding him the smartest, most sarcastic and most realistic of all my customers.

Even he, however, was not beneath a white lie or two. He told his friends that he saw me on the weekends more often than he did. (I had gone to dinner with him twice on a Sunday, but that was it.) For my part, I joked with his co-workers about him and, doing my job, asked them to come back with Kajiwara and me to the club.

“I’d like to,” one of them said politely. “But I can’t afford it.”

Men used to be willing to pay to go to hostess clubs, but fewer and fewer are falling under their spell. Younger men frequently go out carousing with their co-workers at night, but are now more likely to go to regular bars or izakaya — traditional, cheap drinking establishments.

I like to think that after Kajiwara’s friends left us, they went home to their wives — for once at a reasonable hour.

Part 6: Flirting with danger: Sex and the single hostess.

“The way she looks at him, she looks like she’s completely in love with him,” my customer said in a hushed voice. “She’s a very good hostess.”

She was. The ability to fake love may be the hostess’s most important skill. Every girl at Verdor had a minimum of one or two serious customers who either accompanied her to the club after dinner or came to meet her there on a regular basis. It wasn’t hard to keep track of which customer was whose, and what he came for. Amanda’s best customer was a slave to her bullying and strong intelligence; Tara’s patrons were wild about her golden beauty and prima ballerina hauteur; Elise’s men loved her singing voice.

A hostess has to identify her strengths and play off them, because the competition is stiff. Most clubs are notorious for fur-flying catfights, where kittenish women battle it out for customers among the fast-draining supply. Japan is, after all, in a recession, and things are getting harder for everyone.

As the weeks went by and I realized that my mama-san, Midori, fired girls who couldn’t trick customers into falling for them quickly enough, I became puzzled. I didn’t understand how I had succeeded where other girls had failed. (When I was an 8-year-old Girl Scout I had been voted, on a camping trip, “the hostess with the mostest” for my skills at ushering in girls at mealtime, but that couldn’t have been prophetic.)

My customers enjoyed talking about literature and appreciated my sincere interest in Japanese culture and karaoke. But I still didn’t understand what they were looking for in me.

I asked Mr. Kobayashi, a consultant and former politician, why he preferred me, and he replied, “When we men come here, we come to take part in a fairy tale. You believe in that fairy tale.”

He had hit on something. It was true that, as a bit of a dreamer, I did relish being part of a fantasy: donning a foreign persona (the ideal beloved, the fatal temptress, the dream woman) and leaving reality at home. That is what I thought the “floating world” was all about.

And in some ways it is a fairy tale. For a few hours, an aging man — most of the regulars were over 50 — gets to spend time with a lovely young woman, with no complications in sight. For a few hours, the woman is paid to act as if she adores him. In this situation, even the typical lack of sex could be considered an advantage, because it makes for a more idealized, more aestheticized affair.

Being somewhat of a perfectionist, I took my new occupation more seriously than I probably ought to have taken it. In the beginning, at least, I strove to be an impeccable companion. I remember the heart palpitations that overtook me the first time I went out to dinner with a customer before work — my first douhan, Mr. Mori. Arriving at work on the arm of your patron was, in theory, kind of like entering a ballroom with a gorgeous date; all the other girls who had come to work unaccompanied would look over enviously, and you could hold your head higher, basking in Midori’s approving smile.

In reality, however, you were probably already drunk on champagne (your customer having gotten a jump-start on making you tipsy) and already sick of his highly limited conversation (most men talked about work, the weather and sex — and little else). One of the advantages of having a devoted patron, however, is that his talk tends to be a little less smutty than that of occasional customers who come to carouse with their drinking buddies. After all, serious customers really do want you to like them.

The serious ones take you to the best restaurants in Tokyo — or at least what they consider the best. I’ve been treated to dinner at exquisite and intimate restaurants that serve steak made from the famous hand-massaged, beer-fed Kobe cows. But I’ve also been taken to some very odd places, like a members-only restaurant where everything is high class, from the well-trained waiters and beautiful furniture to the foie gras, except that the waitresses are dressed like Playboy bunnies. (I can’t seem to get away from them.)

Usually, if she has a douhan, a hostess will meet her customer around 6 or 7 for a leisurely dinner before they go to the club together. This is the expected plan. I’ve rarely heard of a customer asking a girl to dinner on a weeknight and then flatly refusing to accompany her to her club afterward, though some men do try to get out of this expensive part of the bargain. After dinner it’s usually enough to just lightly take the customer’s arm and tell the cabdriver to head toward Akasaka — and he acquiesces. You both have roles to play.

It’s the woman’s job to figure out how to burrow so deeply into her customer’s heart that she will not be dislodged, no matter what he has to pay to be entertained by her or how many leggy foreign girls flash smiles at him. Hostesses do this in a variety of ways. Sandra, for instance, strengthened the bond with her clumsiest customer by asking him to take social dance lessons with her on Saturdays. Amanda, a true dominatrix, constantly sent her customers firm and witty e-mails, literally demanding their company at the club.

I received instruction on how to care for Mr. Suzuki, one of my fans, from Midori herself. “He likes to be yelled at,” she told me.

“Really?”

“Yes, yes — slam the phone down on him when he calls you. He’ll come to the club that night.”

I tried this, and it worked. This wasn’t the art of love, it was the art of war.

In this game of manipulation you have to make fast decisions. If a love-struck customer shows up at the club while you’re with another “suitor,” you have to play it right, perhaps by faking a tantrum while the first customer is in the restroom, demanding to the waiter that he switch your seating in tones loud enough for the second man to overhear. With the first man, however, you still have to act sweet and fascinated — you can’t let either one suspect your faithlessness.

Sometimes girls have to make changes in their personality and outward level of intelligence, maybe even adjusting their fluency in Japanese. Less is sometimes more, and some men prefer to talk to girls they perceive to be dumb. Others, however, enjoy wide-ranging conversations about their favorite topics — current affairs, travel, history, literature — and hostesses sometimes bone up on customers’ pet subjects in an attempt to impress them. When you talk to a customer, it is also important to make your life sound exciting — and to never talk about bills or mundane worries or your “real” love relationships.

Keeping the conversation rolling and acting “genki” (or lively) are key to success as a hostess. After all, you’re supposed to be more interesting than the women the men see on a daily basis — their girlfriends or their wives. In their minds, they always have room for one more woman.

Despite the obvious insincerity of the “love” for sale in such an environment, many customers do fall for their favorite hostess and expect their feelings to be reciprocated — never mind whether their age is two or three times that of the girl.

All my fellow hostesses had that problem — customers who believed that the girl they paid so handsomely to drink and dine with them was a girlfriend. Of course, we each fed those hopes. A hostess plays a strung-out game involving that most ancient question: Will she or won’t she? Her job is to get as much money as possible out of the customer before he realizes that she won’t. At that time, he might move on to another girl or simply abandon that club altogether. Still, many customers hang in there month after month, with a resigned attitude and an open checkbook.

These rather desperate fantasies become more explicable when you consider the cultural environment. Throughout Japanese literature and aesthetics, the preferred kind of love is one marked by poignant sadness — the unrequited desire, the dying bride, the lovers who have no chance to be together except through double suicide. Seen in this light, the “floating world” of geisha and hostess clubs may be desirable because of the very impossibility of true love within it.

Still, to really make this fantasy work, the hostess has to be either a calculating bitch or something of a dreamer — maybe a little of both. She has to get something out of it, and if money isn’t the only thing she cares about, then she has to, at some level, emotionally value her customers’ worship of her. I know I did; in a way, this false love was addictive.

I looked forward to seeing my customers’ faces light up when I met them at restaurants before work; I went out of my way to look attractive so that my appearance would reflect well on them. That, after all, was a great part of what they were paying for. I did my best to entertain them with talk and flattery and singing, since I wanted to justify their regard for me, especially when they saw such a limited part of me.

Other women had more serious problems with love and its fakery. Sherry, one co-worker, fell in love with a 40-year-old married customer, only to have him drop her for Louise, another hostess at Verdor. She lost both him and the money she had made before and while he was her boyfriend. (She saw him outside of work for free during their affair, but he continued to meet her at the club as a paying customer.) For weeks afterward she had to force back tears as he fawned over his new girlfriend at the next table. By the time I left Verdor he was already flirting with a third hostess.

Like this playboy, a hostess is likely to be juggling several customers at once, but she has to be careful to appear neither too popular nor too desperate. To do well in the business, it’s best to have two or three serious patrons at any given time. But avoiding collisions — two customers at the club at once, for instance — is like running an obstacle course in high heels. You have to come across as faithful, even though everyone knows that it’s your job to not be.

Part 5: Hostesses, wives and co-workers.

So I answered an ad in Tokyo Classifieds, an English-language weekly, that took me to the Akasaka district. Apparently I was extremely lucky: Verdor, an exclusive members-only hostess club famous for being staffed strictly by foreign girls, hardly ever advertised. For recruits it relied on the pickings of talent scouts and the attractive friends of employees. Midori, the club’s owner and “mama-san,” took one look at me and immediately began explaining the club’s complicated system of salary and bonuses.

“Excuse me, but does that mean I have the job?” I asked, somewhat confused at how easy it had been. “Oh, sure,” Midori smiled. For a while I thought it was my Japanese skills and my offbeat style of dress — akin to Midori’s own — that won me the job.

Soon, however, I realized that Midori, a clever businesswoman, often took a chance on girls who seemed reasonably attractive and intelligent, even if they didn’t have their own customers. (In the hostessing business, having your own customers is like having a Harvard MBA.) If the new girls didn’t work out — that is, if they didn’t bewitch enough men during the first week or two — she was just as ruthless about firing them.

Verdor has been around for 20 years and continues to flourish as countless other hostess clubs close their doors, victims of the struggling Japanese economy and the slashing of corporate expense accounts. One reason for Verdor’s success is its mama-san, Midori. Traditionally, all hostess bars had a mama-san — often, but not always, the club’s owner, a woman who was part nurturer, part impresario — to keep things running smoothly between the women and the customers. Women come and go, customers too, but the mama-san, often a former hostess herself, understands the business and the hearts of men as few people do.

At Verdor, Midori was the much beloved star. Customers from 15 years back came to marvel at her Cirque du Soleil-style outfits and her husky voice before turning to the hostesses. Her voice was so low and her style so wild that a common rumor among her less loyal customers was that she’d undergone a sex change.

Despite this, there was something about Midori that was as comfortable as the rest of her was unconventional. Mama-sans have to have a nurturing personality. Although they are expected to be stylish and classy, they are almost as desexualized as wives in Japanese society. Men come to the mama-san for coziness and a touch of panache, and to her hostesses for titillation.

With me, as with the other girls, Midori was kind but somewhat distant; she left me alone to do my job as long as I was making her money. And I was. But it’s tricky: Of course the mama-san wants her hostesses to be successful, since her own income depends on it, but she doesn’t want them to be too successful.

The relationship between my friend Anna and her mama-san, Toni (at another high-class club), is a good case in point. Toni was an exotic-looking former hostess from Spain who had recently been named the mama-san — but not the owner — at Anna’s club. This tenuous position of power made Toni nervous, even though she had been incredibly successful during her 10-year career as a hostess. Because of her anxieties about success as a mama-san, and as an aging woman in the business, she latched onto Anna, who was kind and loyal — a rarity among hostesses. “You’re the only person I can trust,” Toni repeatedly told her.

The problem was that Anna couldn’t really trust Toni. While it is typically a mama-san’s job to introduce her long-established customers to new women — her younger, prettier hostesses — Toni was reluctant to let Anna go out to dinner with them alone. She’d arrange to chaperone, and this left the customers disgruntled and Anna frustrated, because her mama-san was keeping her from making money rather than helping her. The customers interested in Anna wanted to see her alone, and when they couldn’t, some of them stopped coming to the club.

This, of course, only made Toni panic more, and she grew even more possessive of her remaining customers. Finally Anna decided to move to another club. “Please don’t take my customers with you,” Toni begged, somewhat unreasonably, because of course Anna had to build up a clientele at her new club to impress the owner.

Her new place did not have a mama-san. “Thank God,” she told me. “They’re more trouble than they’re worth.”

In the end, Toni lost about three steady customers who switched from her club to Anna’s. Toni was bitter and resentful, and became even more so when her club went bankrupt. She’s back to being a mere hostess again — and Anna’s having a ball.

This is a worst-case scenario of the mama-san/hostess tension, but it’s always difficult when a lot of women are competing for men, love and money in a space about the size of an American living room.

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Until recently Ginza was the undisputed center for high-level entertainment in Japan’s capital, but these days Akasaka is beginning to outstrip it, becoming the preferred playground for the political movers and shakers in Tokyo. Home to some of the city’s best hotels and one of its four major entertainment districts, Akasaka masks behind its modern façade a world of tradition in the form of manicured Japanese gardens, tiny temples and meandering side streets jammed with restaurants. It is also one of the few neighborhoods in Tokyo that still boasts geisha clubs. Until two years ago it was the site of an annual public dance performance by geisha and maiko (apprentice geisha).

At a place like Verdor, the hostessing system is more complicated than it is at clubs in Roppongi or Shinjuku. At the most basic level, customers pay to drink with young women at a club that’s open from 8 or 9 in the evening until 2 or 3 in the morning. They come most often in groups, particularly with co-workers, but if a man is really smitten with one of the hostesses he will probably come alone or with her.

The more smitten he is, the more often he will come, and therein lies the game — a rather expensive one. At Verdor the men had to pay $150 per person for the first hour ($200 if they arrived with a hostess whom they had just taken to dinner — and we’re not talking McDonald’s — on a system known as “douh an”) and $100 per person for each subsequent hour.

The drinks are extra (though most regulars purchase a bottle, usually of whiskey, to last them for several visits), as are “requests” for a particular woman to sit at your table ($20-$30 per request). Clubs in less prestigious neighborhoods are generally cheaper, but most Ginza and Akasaka establishments average about $100 to $200 an hour. Prices are somewhat reduced from 10 years ago, before Japan’s economic bubble burst.

But the prices can be higher. At some hostess clubs in the Gion district of Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital, men might ask the mama-san to order geisha or maiko to supplement the hostesses’ company, but it costs them dearly: $1,000 per hour to drink with one maiko or $500 per hour for one geisha, in addition to the club’s normal fees.

The environment at Verdor was hypercontrolled: Midori decided which hostess would sit with which customer, and the women had to pay attention to how they greeted and took leave of the men, poured drinks (the only serving they do, since waiters bring any food ordered) and bowed. Amid this charm school rigor, I spent my first month in constant terror of doing or saying the wrong thing. Cultural differences are no excuse for crossing taboos in the most exclusive hostess clubs, where things like habitual leg crossing (considered vulgar) can get you fired.

And karaoke singing is de rigueur at this kind of place. Aside from drinking, talking and flirting, the main entertainment is singing, by both the customer and the hostesses. Karaoke is taken seriously in Japan: Some men take private lessons to improve their skills, and one of Verdor’s regulars — a CEO and a cocaine addict — supplemented the club’s already sophisticated sound system by bringing his own specialized microphone and echo box. Other clubs have more lively forms of entertainment, including live bands, dancers and strip shows. But the traditional hostess club is far more bare-bones in its approach.

Which makes it even more inexplicable to a Westerner why a man would pay so much (the average is $500 to $600) for seemingly so little. The toniest places (the ones that charge the most) don’t offer perks like strip shows or live bands. Instead, they are simply tasteful, quiet oases in the chaos of Tokyo, full of velvet couches, expensive orchids and impeccable service.

In joining Akasaka’s “flower and willow world,” I thought that my luck had finally changed. I had at last found a club whose customers, for the most part, liked intelligent girls. My most effective weapon was neither my blond hair nor my long legs but, rather, my ability to whisper classical Japanese poetry into my customers’ ears and concoct silly haiku with them on paper napkins.

At Verdor, the girls were handpicked by Midori to create an eclectic group of young women. At any given time, the club featured a dozen girls from around the world. While I was there we had a Brazilian samba dancer, a Lithuanian jazz singer, two British students, some part-time models from Canada and the U.S., an Australian artist preparing for her first international exhibition, a Romanian ex-engineer and a New Zealander who was opening a bar in Roppongi with one of her customers. Most could speak at least a little Japanese, a few were fluent, but a couple of girls spoke none at all.

Fortunately for them, many of the customers spoke English — enthusiastically if not correctly. In any case, not understanding Japanese can be a blessing, at times, particularly when the men begin to talk among themselves about matters better left to the imagination.

“What are they saying?” Sherry, a British hostess who understood little of the language, would ask me.

Our charming customer might be in the middle of commenting on the hardness of his penis, the size of another hostess’ breasts or how many times he’d had sex the week before.

“You don’t really want to know,” I’d assure her. Most of the girls were in their mid- to late 20s — a little older than average for top clubs. But this was because the majority had worked in other specialized fields, and while they were not trained in the traditional Japanese arts, they all had at least one talent or special feature that, much as with geisha, helped them to quickly garner their own customers in a cutthroat business. And this was essential, because if they couldn’t attract any patrons, they’d be fired within the first few weeks, banished to the suburbs for less well-paid work as English teachers.

Once we had customers, however, our problems really began. At some moments I found myself wishing that we all were prostitutes. Faking an orgasm has got to be easier than faking love. And, I think, far more honorable.

Part 4: The art of being in love, when you’re not.