Sex is our drug.

A 2018 study by the Hawai‘i State Commission on the Status of Women found that response to online sex ads is far greater in Hawai‘i than in other places in the United States. While the study was met with a fair amount of skepticism, it’s safe to say that it was controversial in its methodology only. Only our deep, collective local denial prevents us from acknowledging the truth in the study’s general conclusion: we have a hell of a lot of sex buyers here.

Of course, we have a lot of buyers! Our two biggest industries are tourism and the military! 

Guess again. Ever wonder about your husband’s Kapiolani ATM withdrawals or his late nights at “the office”? You’ve got your head in the sand if you think tourists, soldiers and sailors are the consumers who really drive our sex-for-hire economy. The repeat johns who line the racketeers’ pockets sleep in every one of Oahu’s bedroom communities from Kapolei to Hawai‘i Kai. These addicts are every man with a disposable income whether they wear a fluorescent safety vest in a closed-off traffic lane or a Reyn Spooner shirt in an air-conditioned office with a view of the harbor.

Our long history of fueling—and being fueled by—the sex trade stretches back a century or more, to the women who inspired, however loosely, W. Somerset Maugham’s Sadie Thompson and older, less known examples. The genesis of a true Honolulu sex trade subculture can be traced back to the sanctioned prostitution on Hotel Street during World War II. When I sat down to transport myself to 1942 or 1954 in composing my most recently completed novel, I thought of The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawai‘i by Beth Bailey and David Farrer. Marie Hara had gifted me with a copy shortly before she passed away, and it has become a treasured reference for its vivid descriptions of the brothels and the queues of uniforms winding around the blocks. 

A rooftop club above the glow of the Club Hubba Hubba neon sign once featured a young naval band saxophonist named John Coltrane; that sign still illuminates a block of Hotel Street. The intersectionality of the demimonde—that’s the cross appeal for many who aren’t there for the sex. Musicians. Interracial couples. Gays. Drug addicts. Writers with onyx monocles.

Though the local marketplace today is full of examples of blatant flesh peddling—internet ads, massage parlors posing as therapeutic establishments, good old-fashioned streetwalking—the least understood and most fascinating is the hostess bar, a venue where local patrons far outnumber visitors and military. It’s an institution born in Asia with a presence in every country that has seen a war and resulting American occupation—Japan post World War II, Korea during and after the Korean War, Vietnam during the Vietnam War—and it has roots in a much older tradition of courtesanship. A business model that was designed to entertain the U.S. GI overseas became an export to Hawai‘i, aimed at a Hawai‘i market. When this happened exactly is cause for speculation, but it’s been a few decades.

The appeal of the courtesan for the medieval civil servant in Asia—the Ming Dynasty tax collector, the Tokugawa traveling magistrate—was the same as it is today for our own government employees and middle managers. A mistress for the evening. Feminine company without the emotional responsibility. It’s not that the hostess is inherently more desirable than these men’s wives, it’s that she comes without the strings attached. An escape. One paid for on a drink-by-drink basis.

A hostess establishment operates thus: customer sits in booth with the hostess of his choice. Customer purchases drinks for himself, and nekohana—an overpriced beverage, usually tea masquerading as something vaguely alcoholic—for the hostess. Customer receives “companionship” in exchange for the nekohana (usually several drinks). “Companionship” includes conversation and sex services and everything in between—hand-holding, general fawning and flattery, someone to pour your beer or shove pupus in your mouth. It’s not always about sex, but in the buyer’s mind, it’s mostly about sex. The ambiguity in what exactly is being “purchased” and the lack of a true quid pro quo money-for-sex contract make hostess bar liaisons nearly impossible to prosecute under prostitution statutes. Most often, actual sexual contact in a back room or by private arrangement offsite is a “reward” after a long “courtship” of many evenings’ worth of expensive drinks in the booth. Think of it not as hiring a sex partner for an hour, but as hiring a girlfriend for the evening.

What’s the big deal with these women? Why would anyone drop so much money on tiny shot glasses of fake booze for not so much as a backrub and some chit-chat on most evenings? You might make the investment yourself and have a seat with one of them. 

Or you could save a couple of Benjamins and read a book and find out. No fiction writer has captured the essence of the Honolulu hostess bar hostess better than Chris McKinney. He has a Toulouse-Lautrec-like eye for the simultaneously attractive and grotesque. And though he provides colorful and accurate glimpses of her in many of his works, his best images of the hostess herself—though in this work they are not found in hostess bars—are in Yakudoshi Age of Calamity (Mutual Publishing, 2016).

Yakudoshi follows local anti-hero Bruce Blanc, hapa ex-con and erstwhile drug dealer, as he attempts to locate and reclaim his missing son. Blanc moves with a Spillanesque sensibility and intensity. The narrative blurs the line between realism and pulp so skillfully that the lurid action seems plausible. In particular, McKinney’s portrayals of the characters Blanc encounters on his quest for his son are rendered with a genuine intimacy, and, in many cases, affection. The best are his sketches of the women of the bars. Although not specifically hostesses, they are a most accurate description of the sharks in that particular tank. McKinney makes us see what makes a lot of men burn holes in their wallets.

There is an ironic allure in the weariness and cynicism McKinney imbues these women with. They’re so tarnished on the inside they’re beautiful with a wabisabi-like aesthetic, like the old ceramic vase with a chip and fracture:

But as I’m sitting here watching this girl pour my shot out of a stainless steel shaker, what I’m thinking is maybe they got smarter. Maybe they figured out life isn’t short; it’s long. That they finally somehow knew deep inside that their lives didn’t mean shit anyway. But their looks did.

In this strange little world of overpriced drinks, men seem to desire hostesses the way they do cars: they want what looks good and makes them look good, though the cost of maintenance kills them. And few realize they don’t own them; they lease them. Yakudoshi’s Olive, a Bentley among Toyotas, though ostensibly not a hostess bar denizen, could be found running the floor in any real-life establishment:

I glance at the Hermes bag, the Bentley keys, and the rail of coke sitting in front of her and grin right back. This bitch can probably fit a Glock, a Taser, the kid, and her two-hundred pound boyfriend in that bag. Olive. About five-seven, under-hundred skinny, with big fake titties. Supposedly one of the biggest dealers in town.

And she’s sharp, to boot:

She rummages through her shit and pulls out a book. She hands it to me. A literate drug kingpin. Yup, the world has changed.

I take the book. It’s called Love in The Time of Cholera.

“What’s it about? I ask.

“Love,” she says.

“Isn’t cholera some kind of disease?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Olive says. “But isn’t love, too?”

On every page in which she makes an appearance, it’s apparent that Olive’s most addictive drug for sale is not her looks, but her presence.

Yakudoshi, McKinney’s other books, and perhaps Mark Panek’s descriptions of the hostess bar-as-boardroom in Hawai‘i, are the only real literary references we have to these establishments. We should have more. And someone should really pen something about the women on the opposite side of this world: not just the bar hostesses, but the wives and daughters of the addicts who are subjected to the emotional and financial challenges of the behavior of these men and who endure. I’d buy that book in a heartbeat.

For the time being, we only have a look at the women in the neon glow. Though on many levels they are self-serving and calculating, McKinney’s portraits of them provide an explanation for the willingness of mortal men to burn paychecks at their altars in prayer for their company. Though fiction, this book excels in its plausibility. The images are exquisite because they are familiar. Yakudoshi’s many “hostesses”—from Olive to Blanc’s mother and aunt to his ex-wife Sarah—are precisely the kind of women whose company is worth the price of admission to the regular occupants of the vinyl-upholstered booths.

Pick up Yakudoshi Age of Calamity for a glimpse of Chris McKinney’s gorgeous ukiyo-e of our very own Floating World, lodged somewhere between Downtown and Waikiki. It’s also a damn good hardboiled yarn and a taste of our finest local noir.

Image by Morica Pham.