[/floatl]Forbes: Sex And The City Of The Future...Tokyo, let us remember, is still by far the largest, the richest and the most complex city the human race has ever devised. And it's by far the most perverse, the most erotically intricate. Is this a coincidence? I think not. I remember going to a love motel in Shinjuku 15 years ago with a girl I had just met in a bowling alley. There was no receptionist, just a credit card machine and a key dispenser. The Japanese girl thought this was unremarkable, but what unnerved me at the time was the absence of prurience, of any inquiring gaze from staffers who might have made us feel delectably uncomfortable. This Asian indifference was more disconcerting to me than than anything else...We took a Louis XV suite with a revolving bed, bedside truffles included, and I recall wondering if this was kitsch, a novel form of spatial intimacy, or a way of intensifying the ritual of sexual acquaintance with a total stranger? But soon those very questions became irrelevant. In the end, we stayed two days...
...Years later I was in Tokyo again, this time to research a book, and I was invited out by some lawyers to visit a "special club" for gentlemen. We went in a group of eight and were shown onto a room that contained a perfect replica of a suburban commuter train. In this carriage, a young woman sat innocently reading a newspaper. One of the men present paid up and was admitted to the carriage. At first he sat far from the girl, minding his own business, and then gradually he moved closer to her, seat by seat, until he was next to her. She looked up disapprovingly and told him, I think, to piss off. At which point he leaped on her, sending the paper into the air. The carriage door burst open and two "cops" came in with handcuffs and gave him a dressing-down. He was then led away, protesting loudly, while the girl recomposed herself. What to make of this? Juvenile fantasy, or cunning artifice for obtaining imaginative release?...more...
