Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. xviii, 225 pp. (B&W photos.) US$22.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8047-9124-3.
Akiko Takeyama’s Staged Seduction is a remarkable entry in the surprisingly crowded field of ethnographic portraits of the sex/companion industries in Asia. Joining the pioneering Nightwork by Anne Allison, Tiantian Zheng’s Red Lights, Kimberly Kay Hoang’s Dealing in Desire, and Rhacel Parreñas’s Illicit Flirtations as a work that sheds light on negotiations between commercial pressure, sexual desire, and fantasy, Staged Seduction focuses unusually on male hosts and their female clients in Tokyo. Although the book draws, as might be expected, from scholarship on gender relations in contemporary Japan, Takeyama’s real goal is to contribute to pressing debates in anthropology and social theory regarding temporality, affective labour, and the cultural consequences of neoliberalism.
For Takeyama, the crux of the host club industry’s role in late capitalist Japan is the virtually pristine way in which seduction—both in the somewhat conventional sense related to romantic longing and in its broader connotations—harnesses people’s goals for the future toward their consumption and productive practices. It takes little imagination to see why a host’s professional success would depend on his ability to appeal to the desires of potential clients, particularly those clients flush with cash. But Takeyama astutely traces, through a set of delicate and persuasive portraits, the ways in which the host clubs themselves stoke and manage the ambitions and fears of their employees, as well as the complex manner in which clients imagine their own futures with the hosts. Throughout the book, Takeyama pays careful attention to the ways in which these figures in the host clubs reflect on their lives, choices, and their potential.
As an ethnographer, Takeyama brings two key strengths to the work. First, she seems to be a remarkable interlocutor. Some portraits are perhaps to be expected, like that of a lonely middle-aged housewife and mother concerned about her ostensibly declining attractiveness, but others are almost shocking in respondents’ seemingly candid descriptions of their sex lives, their desires, their turn-offs. Takeyama’s obvious skill in speaking with and listening to a diverse set of clients and hosts yields a variety of raw details that provide an unnervingly convincing glimpse into these informants’ lives. But she never sensationalizes accounts that themselves leap off the page, shrewdly turning instead to her next episode or to a theoretical intervention designed to make sense of the scene.
Second, she is an expert at organizing her material, a key challenge to anyone returning from extensive, sometimes all-consuming fieldwork. Takeyama opens and closes with her own personal stories, one with a host and one with a client, that highlight the complex dynamics of seduction. She also holds off on discussing the elephant in the room—sexual relations between hosts and clients—until surprisingly late in the book. The most devastating account, at least to my eyes, comes early in the book, as Takeyama describes a host whose most lucrative client is a recent widow who has paid most of her savings to the club to maintain her relationship with him, taking a waitress job to continue paying the bills in the hope that, once enriched, the host will quit the club to follow his dream of helping poor children overseas. This leads, however, not to a set of further depictions of luckless women being duped by devious cads, but a convincing and moving array of arresting portrayals of hosts and clients alike. The hosts, often migrants from smaller cities with limited education, are drawn into the promise of a high-spending, elite lifestyle before finding themselves indebted to clubs when customers stiff them on the bills, enduring good-cop-bad-cop routines from bullying managers, and drinking nearly biblical amounts of alcohol while maintaining relationships simultaneously with several clients, the sudden departure of even one being potentially ruinous. The clients, some of whom are sex workers themselves, invest themselves emotionally as well as financially in these relationships, but in nuanced ways that Takeyama covers extensively. Try as Takeyama might to problematize hosts and clients alike, the men’s primary goal (basically, money) seems quite a bit simpler than the women’s far more diverse motives.
Tying them together is neoliberal Tokyo: a metropolis embedded in a national political economy whose always-partial promises about the future has tended to locate them in the oft-criticized model of a single male breadwinner and a devoted wife and mother taking care of the kids and sometimes her in-laws. Transformations in the employment system combined with new forms of consumerism relentlessly peddled in the mass media have together inspired ways of imagining the future that can then become central to the affective markets of the host club. If I can keep these women happy for long enough, I’ll get rich and be able to open my own club. If I can make the host the top earner, he can realize his dreams and be suitably grateful for my contributions. If I can make my host propose marriage to me, I will demonstrate my own power as a woman. Indeed, Takeyama’s version of romance cannily draws attention away from the more obvious happily-ever-after marriage ideals and toward a kind of self-actualization for participants.
It is occasionally difficult to know when Takeyama analyzes her hosts’ and clients lives as reflecting dimensions of Tokyo’s affective markets, and when she approaches their accounts as narratives reproduced by their own logics. Late in the book, she worries that one of her informants (a client) has been dishonest with her, a concern she turns to a fascinating reflection on how she, as an ethnographer wanting to craft a study, has herself been seduced. It’s a bold decision, but deliberate dishonesty might well be less important than the possibility that her informants, in explaining their behaviour to her, are recounting stories that they want to believe about their lives and their goals, seducing even themselves. This is however less a problem than a minor question, one provoked by this thoughtful, engaging, beautifully composed work.
David Leheny
Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan