People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo—and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up

by Richard Lloyd Parry

The argument of Nightwork was that, rather than sex, hostess clubs were actually about work. By encouraging and subsidizing the salaryman to spend his evenings together with colleagues, clients, and hostesses (rather than at home with his wife and children), Japanese corporations enabled him to discharge stress and frustration in a way that served the corporations’ ends—bonding with his workmates and building good relations with clients. The hostess club was both leisure and work; in colonizing the salaryman’s after-office hours, as well as the working day, the company ensured that his first loyalty was not to his family but to his job.