Every morning I dressed in a swallow-tailed jacket stained with the sweat of a previous shift worker, assumed a fake name, and pretended to be an English butler for the women, and occasionally men, who visited a mock castle interior on the fifth floor of a beige high rise.
The premise was that these customers were princesses or princes who had traveled without a passport and ended up in a foreign land.
Often, they were dressed the part and on arrival they were given a bell to ring for service. As a butler, my job was to take guide them into curtained-off nooks or behind trellises studded with artificial roses. There, we could flirt and swap stories, and I could earn commissions by encouraging them to order the pseudo-Italian fare and brightly colored cocktails we served up. It was one of scores of fantasy diversions scattered across the city. A couple floors down, men could pay for dates with young women in school uniforms.
Elsewhere, there were fetish dungeons and, for the less adventurous, co-sleeping specialty shops that charged for cuddles by minute increments. From office workers in plastic tiaras I learned you could pick mushrooms near Kyoto; from out-of-towners claims that Nagoya had the best miso soup in Japan.
But despite this, it hosted loyal regulars. The butlersβnone fluent Japanese speakersβwere hardly qualified counselors. But the castle served an important function: it was a confessional, remote from the megalopolis below and, for some, a secret world in which to disappear. My short stint there, and the stories the customers shared, came to mind recently, when I came across a book about Japanese people vanishing by the thousands.
