Marcel Winatschek

Twenty In Ginza

I like those A Day With shorts that VICE does—short enough to actually finish, long enough that you feel like you’ve seen something real. They don’t try to explain anything. Just here’s someone, here’s how they live.

Kanae Murakami is twenty and lives in Ginza. She makes money going out with wealthy businessmen in Tokyo—one of those transactions that exists in a gray space with no clean English equivalent. There’s rougher stuff before this: she broke her teacher’s spine, got kicked out of home, ended up in Tokyo. She talks about it the way you do after you’ve accepted it and moved on.

She talks about the men she sees with complete flatness—they have money, she needs it, everyone knows the deal. No performance, no story she tells herself about who she is.

The thing that stuck with me was the thing the video just leaves hanging: how long does this work? What’s next, if there is a next? She’s not worried about it—or she’s not saying she is. But that’s always how it happens. You think you have time.