Gave me the creeps after a while ( )

I enjoy memoirs and travel books that take the reader deep within a foreign culture, and I hate memoirs that detail the author's self-destruction. What do I make of a book that combines both? It's still pretty good.

Lea Jacobson spent a little more than a year working in Tokyo at a hostess bar, part of the city's "floating world" of women selling fantasy and romance. At the bar, the hostesses flirt and coax wealthy salarimen to buy exorbitant drinks. Surprisingly, there is no touching or nudity allowed -- the men are there to spend time with, not fondle or ogle the girls.

Though the environment is sexually restrained, it would be a mistake to call Palace or Heaven, the two clubs Jacobson works for, healthy environments. The women must drink so much (to keep up with the men buying them drinks) that many sneak away to vomit before returning to the table for more. Jacobson, who wasn't completely stable to begin with, spirals out of control in the hedonistic, superficial world of the hostess bar. Tedious trauma ensues.

Despite my distaste for human disaster stories, the glimpse of Japanese culture, with its unique customs and sometimes disturbing social mores, is fascinating. Before I picked up this book, I had never heard of a hostess bar, much less a dohan, or a bar mama. Learning about this variety of Japanese life made slogging through the flame outs more than worth it. ( )

In Bar Flower: My Decadently Destructive Days and Nights as a Tokyo Nightclub Hostess, Lea Jacobson recounts the roughly two years she spent as a nightclub hostess in Tokyo’s Ginza district.

After she went to Japan in 2003 to work as an English teacher, Jacobson was fired from her job after a psychiatrist spilled the beans to her employer about her fragile emotional condition. She then went to Tokyo, where she began work as a hostess, entertaining Japanese “sararimen,” even though she was psychologically unwell and unable to cope with the rigid demands of Japanese culture. Jacobson describes this underbelly of Tokyo culture as being in a “floating world,” where everything is fluid and nothing stays constant for very long. As a result, Jacobson’s identity kept changing. Along the way, we’re introduced to a variety of interesting characters, including a dragon-like mama-san, an Irish boyfriend named Nigel, who lies to her and breaks her heart; and a four-year-old girl who learned fluent English entirely from Disney movies.

Jacobson’s knowledge and analysis of Japanese culture is spot-on. She details her drug addiction without feeling sorry for herself, and I found myself becoming emotionally invested in her heartbreaking story. But Jacobson learns a valuable lesson from her mistakes, and she does a wonderful job of analyzing, not rationalizing, her decisions. ( )