Stacy Klein of Playboy.com has discovered an interesting and sexy new memoir. Here’s her report:

Writer Lea Jacobson left the States at age 18 and eventually found her way to Japan. After a brief stay with a traditional Japanese family and an unsuccessful stint teaching English to children, Jacobson found lucrative work as a nightclub hostess on Tokyo's Ginza strip. Her new memoir, Bar Flower: My Decadently Destructive Days and Nights as a Tokyo Nightclub Hostess, chronicles her struggle to retain her identity while maintaining a love-hate relationship with Japanese culture.

PLAYBOY: Lea, what is a bar hostess?

JACOBSON: Think of a trip to the hostess bar as an erotic but not overtly sexual ego massage. Japanese businessmen work long hours and must remain very obedient to their superiors at the workplace. This experience can be rather emasculating for them, so many will come to a hostess bar after hours to restore their self-confidence and general sense of "manhood." No matter who a client is on the outside or whatever he looks like, as soon as he enters a hostess bar he is surrounded by a flock of young women dressed to the nines, who will happily pamper and flatter him as if he were a movie star.

PLAYBOY: What were your duties?

JACOBSON: My duties as a hostess were to look good, to decorate upscale outings by pouring drinks and lighting cigarettes, to perform symbolic tasks that make you think of sex, and to help along the general atmosphere of extravagance by mixing strong drinks for the clients and requesting expensive cocktails for myself. In many clubs, a hostess's salary depends on how much money she can persuade the customer to spend.
    
The hostess bar is also an important site for male-bonding. When one company seals a business deal with another company, representatives of each business will often go out to a hostess bar together afterwards to solidify their alliance. Or if one company is entertaining an important guest to Tokyo, they often treat him to an evening at a hostess bar. (Hospitality is very, very important here.) But if you have a regular customer, it is sometimes necessary to go out to dinner with him before coming to the club together (this is called a douhan, and it's quite an expensive hobby). You also have to answer phone calls sometimes and act like his platonic girlfriend in a mock relationship.

PLAYBOY: Did any of your fellow bar hostesses ever have sex with clients? What would the professional, mental and cultural penalties be if that happened?

JACOBSON: It's hard to say. Sex is technically against the rules, so no one really talks about it. I suspect that some of the more ambitious hostesses may have gone beyond the call of duty in such a way, hoping to boost their sales in such a competitive environment. But actually, I think it has the opposite effect: The customers whom I suspect took hostesses home are the same ones who never returned to our bar afterwards. Sex means that the game is over (and that the man came out on top), so there's no real point in continuing the romantic charade after the fact.

For a hostess to have sex with a customer is a lot like sticking a needle into an over-inflated party balloon: it's inadvisable. The real goal is to keep the 'regulars' spending money in the fleeting hope that they might get some action one day, a day that in most cases never comes. There are a few urban fairy tales of hostesses who fall in love with and marry their clients, but on the whole, sex is not really the objective of this kind of business. Sex is much less complicated, and a lot cheaper!

PLAYBOY: What tipped you off that your clients were masturbating in the bar bathrooms?

JACOBSON: I assumed that's what the pictures of cabaret dancers hanging above the toilet were for. Besides, I hate to think of what else could be taking everyone so long.

PLAYBOY: How did your book come to be? Do you know what actually became of your bar Heaven and the women who worked there?

JACOBSON: I was really inspired by some of the other women I worked with to put their stories into writing, then their stories became my story because it's the only narrative I can speak of with any certainty. Recounting the last few years of my life in Tokyo made me realize that I had a serious drinking problem, so between writing the first and second drafts of my memoir, I decided to quit drinking. I haven't had a drink for over a year now.

PLAYBOY: Have you stayed in touch with your former colleagues?

JACOBSON: After Heaven closed down, I would hear from the other women sporadically at first. Many of them were still hostessing around Ginza, the last I heard. Sadly, I lost touch with many of them after I quit drinking, because our friendships revolved heavily around alcohol. I recently heard that a co-hostess, "Michi," who had become the mama-san at a new bar at the end of my memoir, fell in love with a male host (the male equivalent of a hostess) and got so driven into debt that she reportedly stole 3 million yen from the bar she was managing, then disappeared. No one has heard from her in a while. I hope she is ok.

PLAYBOY: Have you ever seen the Japanese edition of Playboy? Their editors will add pubic hair to the models' photos if they feel the image shows too much of the model's vagina.

JACOBSON: I can't remember seeing Playboy specifically here, but adding pubic hair sounds a lot like something they would do. In a lot of Japanese porn, all the 'important' parts are so blurred by the censors that there is no real point in watching it. Hardcore comic books or cartoon porn are your best bet. Maybe Playboy should consider producing some erotic cartoons to market in Japan: they're all the rage here, oddly.

PLAYBOY: How would a bar hostess fill out the Playmate Data Sheet?
JACOBSON: Like so...

AMBITIONS: global domination
TURN-ONS: samurai
TURNOFFS: halitosis-plagued salarymen
WHAT I LIKE IN MEN: a delicate blend of patience and boundless generosity
MY BASIC OUTLOOK ON LIFE: A catastrophic earthquake could level Tokyo tomorrow, so spend all your money while you still can!
HOBBIES: Karaoke, fortune-telling, answering questions with questions, being mysterious, agreeing with you, slow dancing with little old men who are a head or two shorter than me. . .
MY IDEAL EVENING: Is your ideal evening, minus that part at the end where you take me home.
WHAT DRIVES ME WILD: lollipops, hot towels, slowly wiping the condensation off of oblong whiskey glasses.
I MAY LOOK INNOCENT BUT: Have you checked your credit balance lately?