Otoko ga otoko wo aisuru toki (When a Man Loves a Man) vol 1

Author: Nitta Youka
Imprint: Hanaoto
Publisher: Houbunsha
ISBN: 4-8322-8043-0

Reviewed by Jeanne

When you want to relax, when you want a break from work, when you want to just hang loose for a few hours, you don't get in your car and drive to the beach. (Beaches are for sitting on in summer with a bunch of other people. Mountains are for climbing with a bunch of other people. Japanese have very stock ideas of what constitutes 'leisure activities' and except for drinking and pachinko and maybe mah jong, they all look to a gaijin exactly the same as work.) You don't take the wife out somewhere for an evening cause you're at the office until nine and she's at home with the kids an hour away. So you go to a bar where a nice lady pours your drinks and listens to you talk and laughs at your double entendres and smutty jokes and makes you feel clever and a real smart fellow. If you have enough money and if you ask nicely and if you have enough time you may be able to arrange a date with her, and you go to a love hotel for some sex. But sex isn't the essence of the trade. Companionship and illusion is. Someone to drink with, someone to make you feel good about yourself.

Which is why our words for this don't apply, because they all assume that sex and not social interaction is what it's all about. Hostesses may be the equivalent of barflies, but they're *professional* barflies with a long and quite honorable tradition in Japanese literature. In a country virtually without psychiatrists, they're the ones who listen and sympathize with a man's problems and give him a sense of self-esteem. The closest thing we have to them is the barkeep who hears the sad stories of all the regulars at his bar. The hostesses are all pocket barkeeps, with the little wrinkle of being the opposite sex of the customers. You don't buy your favourite barkeep a pretty trinket, but you do your favourite hostess.

And now of course there are host bars with hosts to perform the same services for women. Pour their drinks, talk to them nicely, *listen* to them talk (because Japanese men monopolize conversations more than western ones even, and god knows western men never shut up), wheedle tips and pretty presents out of them, sleep with them if necessary. Youka Nitta's When a Man Loves a Man series chronicles the ins and outs of a bunch of hosts in a Shinjuku host bar called Schnapps. (Well, Schapps actually, but they *mean* Schnapps.)

This first volume is episodic and introduces four of the series' main characters. We start right off with Takaaki, oldest of the hosts at Schnapps but no.2 in the rankings, meaning that more guests request (and pay for) the company of the club's top earner, Shinkawa, Takaaki's tall blond kouhai. No matter. The older (26) and experienced Takaaki is the one who sets the tone of the place, and everyone knows it. Shinkawa has a thing for him- a bit of a crush, a little hero worship, a lot of attraction- and hearing from the manager that Takaaki is bi, he starts putting the moves on him. 'I don't mind if you're a guy, since you're you'-- not a line likely to make anyone fall into bed, as Takaaki points out. Shinkawa is big and blond and male, and probably owes his popularity to that. (And is modelled on Jiro of the Jpop group Glay. I might find Shinkawa a bit of a dork if he looked different, but as it is I rather fancy him.) Takaaki is more experienced (sexually and every other way), more polished, more reflective, more knowledgeable. Takaaki is pretty damned impressive, actually. Shinkawa couldn't have picked a better role model to pattern himself on.

It's Takaaki who provides the meditations on the dilemmas inherent in the business. A host's job is to play the role for his customers of the ideal, devoted and loving companion. He creates illusion all his working hours, and in consequence he often has an unconscious but driving need to find something that's undeniably real for himself. A host provides the illusion of romance for his clients, but what does he do if the clients want to believe it's real? Shinkawa's reaction is 'Take them for all their worth.' Takaaki's more professional attitude is that you don't let things get that far in the first place. Takaaki has definite and admirable ideals about the whole hosting business. But hosts are human too. What gives them their grounding reality, what gives them the emotional satisfaction that allows them to stay properly distanced from their clients? Rather clearly, in Takaaki's case, it's other men.

The first we see him with is a very straight (most senses of the word) sincere guy he meets through a mistake, but whom he then pursues with cold-eyed intent. Uroshizaki looks utterly out of place in a host club, but there's no complaints about his action in bed. Watching Takaaki top Uroshizaki from the bottom is an absolute joy. Then there's the will-he-won't-he will-he-won't-he pursuit of Takaaki by Shinkawa. Takaaki is more than a little smug about having Shinkawa under his thumb, and it's doubtless no more than that attractive but bumptious young man deserves. Bumptious young men suffer nicely when the objects of their devotion sit on them hard and often and not the way Shinkawa wants Takaaki sitting on him. (Takaaki is uke, very much by choice and preference.) It's an interesting combination and one has hopes, in this book at least, of it going somewhere.

But alas. All men have their Achilles' heels. Takaaki's is the man who got him into hosting in the first place, who bears the ill-omened name (in Nitta Youka-land) of Iwaki. Iwaki was Takaaki's role model, though one wonders if the young Takaaki wasn't just projecting his high-flown ideals about The Perfect Host onto the first handy cool-looking guy to come along. Iwaki looks to me (and Shinkawa) to be Harry the Rat with Men. Mentored Iwaki in his first host job, became his lover just before leaving the club, then up and walked away. And now (ominous music) he's back, ready to start playing his games with Takaaki's heart again. Polar opposite of the transparently sincere Uroshizaki and the sincere in spite of his best efforts not to be Shinkawa, Iwasaki looks to be bad news all down the line. One hopes that Takaaki may have grown up enough to realize it. This volume ends on an ambivalent note, but I have no great expectations for the future.

(Translation of this volume is available here.)