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Jennifer awoke to a dull throbbing pain in her chest. She opened her eyes to blackness and felt an immediate flare of panic. She wasn’t at home; this wasn’t her room, her bed. The pain in her breasts, a hot, pulsing, generalized ache, was all that distracted her from the strangeness she found herself in. Someone, something had hurt her.

Instinctively, she tried to pull her arms up to cradle her chest, but her arms wouldn’t move. They felt frozen and useless, numb, behind her back. Another bright bloom of panic surged up her throat and exploded in her head and, this time, no amount of pain could stop its eruption. Jennifer rolled onto her side and screamed into the darkness.

She thought perhaps her own scream had rendered her deaf, for in the moments after the echo of it died, there was nothing but deep silence, as deep and empty as the blackness. Then a short, low grunt breached the stillness. She heard the creak of wood and a click. The room flooded with light. Her face was inches from a blank, white wall.

Many things happened at once. Jennifer rolled onto her other side, and backed herself against the wall. It was then she realized that the deadness in her arms had nothing to do with the way she had slept; they were caught behind her back, tied into a neat, folded package. As she moved her fingers, they brushed against her elbows.

Her eyes, stinging and watering in the sudden onslaught of light, cleared enough to see the source of the grunt. A big, squat man in a badly rumpled suit sat staring at her from a low, beaten-up armchair. She pulled her knees up to cover herself, to make herself small.

“The gaijin princess is awake,” he growled. There was sarcasm and disgust in his voice. The grin he gave her was unkind, and his eyes narrowed.

“Who…who…” she began, but even as the question came out, she knew the answer. She recognized the man in the chair but did not know his name. He’d been the one who had ordered twelve bottles of single-malt; one of the many invisible, servile men who ran about making sure their bosses got what they wanted, whenever they wanted it.

At the club, for the last couple of days, he had pestered her to leave the table she was booked to serve and join the crowd of fawning hostesses at Shindo’s table. They’d frequented the club for more than a week, demanding attention, bullying the other customers and generally throwing their weight around. This wasn’t an unusual occurrence at the Blonde Chicks bar. From time to time, some jumped-up, arrogant bunch of Yakuza pricks would monopolize the club’s facilities, but sooner or later, they’d always get bored and leave.

She had told him, politely but firmly, to piss off. This little shit, who couldn’t afford an hour of her time on a good day, who sat in front of her now, sneering, had obviously decided to get even. The panic returned, swimming through her gut like an eel. She’d heard stories—she’d always assumed they were urban myths—of Western hostesses getting snatched and murdered, but she’d never really believed it.

The realization that she was probably going to become just another urban myth struck her as, somehow, pathetic. A pathetic end to a pathetic year; long gone the romantic notions of the mysterious Orient, of tea houses and geisha, of Shinjuku Gyoen and the wannabe rock gods in Harajuku and Yoyogi Park. Six months on, if Jennifer never saw another bowl of ramen, it would be too soon. The cramped apartment she shared with four other Western hostesses, the groping on the subway, and the nasty calls of “Patsukin “ in the street. The job at the Blonde Chicks was