[/floatl]Amazon: Bar Flower - My Decadently Destructive Days and Nights as a Tokyo Nightclub Hostess From Publishers Weekly: What saves this youthful memoir from being a dreary litany of boozy nights spent entertaining drunken big-spenders at Tokyo clubs is American translator Jacobson's knowledge of Japanese culture and language. Having originally landed in Japan in 2003 after college at McGill to work as a kindergarten teacher, Jacobson was fired from her job at the Happy Learning English School in Yokosuka city because the psychiatrist she saw for anxiety revealed her condition in a letter to her employer. Outspoken about discrimination against women in Japanese society, fond of drinking and prone to eating disorders and self-cutting, Jacobson drifted among teaching jobs before settling into the more lucrative but taxing employment as a hostess at the Palace, on Tokyo's Ginza strip, where the reigning mama-san taught her the fine art of being a decorative bar flower who serves men drinks and light conversation without being touched. Jacobson soon found her job leaching into all aspects of her life, and the paid dates, drinking and partying prompted a destructive spiral of cutting and blacking out. Truly fascinated by Japanese mores, Jacobson nonetheless elevates her story with compelling digressions into ukiyo (the floating world), geisha tradition and the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, among other topics, for a candid version of cultural immersion.
A quick browse of this book in a shop suggested that it didn't really have any new angle on foreign hostessing. This hostess blogger liked it when she wrote about it here but she also says in her Amazon review that the book "reveals a side of Japan that hardly gets any attention" which seems at odds with the fact that such narratives have become a staple of foreign writing on Japan. The author, Lea Jacobson, gives a short radio interview here (it's the second feature, about halfway through). She is now married, is still in Japan, and works as a translator.
