Running a Tab in Ginza

Kanae Murakami broke her teacher’s spine when she was a teenager. That’s how the VICE Japan documentary introduces her—casually, as biographical context—before moving on to what she does now.

She’s twenty. She got thrown out of home after the spine incident, ended up in Ginza, and started running what amounts to a long-con extraction on wealthy businessmen—not quite hostess work, not quite fraud, somewhere in between, conducted with the serene efficiency of someone who surveyed her options and optimized accordingly.

Her apartment doesn’t look like much. But Ginza apartments don’t come cheap, and she pays hers. The camera follows her through a day without comment. It just lets the arithmetic land.

The questions I came away with aren’t moral ones. They’re practical. She’s twenty—the men she’s working won’t stay useful or interested indefinitely. What does thirty look like? She doesn’t appear to be worried about it, which either means she has a plan or she’s decided not to ask the question yet. Both are entirely plausible at twenty.