An excerpt from Settlers Landing, out from Itna Press on November 28th, 2023.
Order the novel here.
None of the men I go with ever admit it, but they all like me because I shave my head. It makes me look like a boy. That’s why they won’t say. I know the reason. Because all men are at least part gay and don’t want to admit it to themselves. And so women who look like me wind up being quite popular. Some compliment me on what they call my punk look. And anyway, punk is so passé, why would I bother moving all the way to Tokyo to take it on?
This one is typical, another fat rich jerk. My novel is going to be full of them. I need to find some way to vary it or else it’ll get really boring. Of course most people will read it just for the sex. I can’t say I blame them—that’s just how human beings work. Hell, it makes the job sort of easy for me. And, let’s face it—much more fun than going into boring ass academia.
A curly-haired rich creep from America. Likes it that I’m from there too, that we speak the same language. Honestly I didn’t come halfway across the world to service American guys. But it’s late, and what the fuck. It’s about the money, sure. But it’s also about the material. See what he has to say and whether it’ll be useful. Make it into something useful, if it’s not.
He buys me drinks, we shoot the shit. I do the flirty birdy thing. Get him all hot and excited. Even rest my hands on his hand, which turns out to be fake. Then move down to his inner thigh. Move them up toward the source of all that spending, feel it harden through the fabric. Offer him a Viagra. He says he doesn’t need it.
This one’s as extravagant as they come. Says he’s had a stressful day, that it’s just the beginning of what is bound to be a really long trip. He wants to party all the way. Go to the limit. I ask what his fantasy is. We go back and forth like that, a bunch of bullshit, till I get him to spill something coherent. He wants to flirt some more, it takes a long time to pull it out of him. When I finally do, it’s like, okay. It’s nothing I haven’t done before, and it certainly doesn’t come as a big surprise—a lot of these big spenders who come to Japan want it. Hell, some of them come here for that very reason. Blame porn, I guess—if blame is really the right word to use for, well… our industry. It is a promotional tactic, after all. It’s very little actual work for me. I mean, the build-up is so much more. This right here. It’s just sort of a bitch to arrange. Especially at this hour. But not impossible. Just have to put in a call to the asshole hotline, which runs twenty-four hours.
I cater to a particular taste, it is true. A far cry from the geisha fantasy so many still entertain. Usually it’s Japanese guys, salarymen eager to indulge their own racist fantasy. A lesson in degradation: that’s in many ways what my novel is going to be.
There’s nothing more transparent in this world than what men want. That can’t be what the novel’s all about. If it’s just that, then it would be a pretty thin book. It would mean I’m wasting my time—not to mention my youth. Not to mention putting everything at risk—my health, my well-being. Diary of a Tokyo Call Girl. I thought of that as a title once, but now I don’t know, it sort of sounds too obvious. Maybe something more poetic rather than something totally commercial. But if I get all artsy and abstract, then will the thing sell? I guess it’s one of those things about being an artist. It’s so hard to tell sometimes.
By the time we get back to his hotel, there’s already a couple of slobs waiting for us in the lobby. One of them, wearing this maroon leather jacket, I know from work. Meaning I’ve worked with him before. I haven’t done a ton of porn—I don’t want to risk that kind of exposure, it won’t be good for my later writing career—but there’s this one company here where they blur everything—including the faces of the models, if you ask them to do it. Once part of the censorship laws in Japan, but it’s been going on for so long now that most Japanese guys actually get off on the censorship—if it’s not blurred they can’t even get aroused. Something about memories from their teenage years when they were first starting to jack off and look at porn, back when the censorship laws were way more strict, having to use their imaginations to (no pun intended) fill in the gaps. Like being confronted by the actual thing now robs them of the mystery that must have so titillated them back then.
We didn’t fuck or anything. It was just a tickle fetish video. He’s a Shinjuku dick for hire. Probably hasn’t left the neighborhood in years. Decades, even. He’s been in a lot of stuff. Everything from fetish to hardcore. Mostly fetish, I guess, which usually means no fucking. Anything from smearing goo all over a woman’s expensive clothing (yes, guys actually pay money to watch this and masturbate to it, don’t ask me why) to getting tied up and mock tortured. It’s hard to know whether guys like that actually still enjoy doing what they do. Whether they even once did. My guess is not. Not anymore, at least. The terminally unemployable sort that turns low lifery, base instincts into a fine art form. If that’s not putting too flowery a spin on it.
The other creep I don’t really know. Just another sad sack whose perversions have thrown him into this gutterish existence. God, listen to me… He looks middle-aged, actually not half bad, and is wearing beneath his coat an old worn suit, giving him the air of a former salaryman fallen on hard times. Like his wife kicked him out and he’s just living out of different capsule hotels. Maybe that’s exactly what happened. I’ve seen enough of it to know. It’s not like I’m going to bother to ask anyway.
Up in the suite, I start to prepare the room. I tell the client to call down to reception, request extra sheets and towels. He asks me how many. I tell him, I don’t know, use your head. The one on your shoulders this time. That gets a smirk out of him. There’s no longer any point in being polite right now. The jerk is clearly so excited by what’s about to transpire, he can barely keep it in his bathrobe. It’s not like he’s going to suddenly pull the brakes. He’s already paid me half the money as a deposit. So I’ve entered full in on the mode of getting this over ASAP so I can get the rest of it and just go the fuck home. It’s late.
The doorbell rings and I go to open it, thinking it’s the sheets and towels. Instead it’s three more guys, including Kazumi, a yakuza guy I used to date with. I purposefully called him in to participate, more for protection than anything else. You need someone you can trust on your side in these scenarios.
The doorbell again, and this time it is the sheets and towels, followed by a room service tray with champagne, whiskey, beer, and a bunch of glasses. I tell them to put it up against the wall next to the wardrobe. The sad sack goes immediately up to the makeshift bar and pours himself a whiskey. The other guys ignore the booze for the moment. All the furniture’s been pushed against the wall and I spread one of the bedsheets out on the floor. Phone rings again and two more guys come up.
Kazumi takes his shirt off. His entire torso is covered in a tattoo that’s expanded since the last time I saw it. Yakuza guys have some of the loveliest art work on their bodies. This is why I never mind going with them. I always make a mental note, write down a description of the tattoos after. (I mean, it could be really poetic to have an entire chapter of the novel just be descriptions of yakuza guys’ tattoos?) In Kazumi’s case, it’s like full body armor against a black background. Only the armor is dragon skin. He’s a man until he takes his clothes off, then he transforms into something reptilian. In the middle of his stomach, a bright red koi fish. In the middle of his back, the smiling dragon’s head.
The other guys follow his lead and start to disrobe. Their bodies are less attractive, more dumpy, unsculpted. It’s late, it’s all we could get at this hour. The American client goes into the bathroom to take a piss, re-emerges in his white terrycloth robe, swigging from a bottle of champagne he can’t be bothered to pour into a glass.
Tattoos in Japan aren’t meant to be shown; they’re meant to be hidden away. Moments like this, when they’re revealed, like the genitals, it’s like the sun rising in the middle of darkest night. I ask the client how he wants me—in what state of disrobement. It varies, and something like that, you can never make assumptions. First he offers me a swig from the champagne bottle. To drink after him would be to create an illusion of intimacy that’s not included in the package. He tells me to take my top off. He wants my tits out, the panties he says I can leave on.
Is it Wednesday night or Thursday? Hours like this, you never know anymore.
The Japanese guys are all in their underwear now. Nobody has to instruct them, they know exactly what they’re doing. They’re professionals—if you can really ascribe any degree of expertise to what they variously do for a living.
It’s not that many men, anyway. If it were any more, it would be close to unbearable. As it is now, this is something I can handle. I’ve had worse. Entire yakuza gangs—several dozen guys at a time. But that would be too interesting to describe here. I’m saving it.
I tell the American to bring me a couple pillows. He gives me two. I throw them in the middle of the sheet on the floor, then tell him to bring me a third. I sit on the ground. Kazumi bends down, asks me in his broken English if I’m doing okay. I tell him in Japanese I’m fine, that I just want to get this over with. He stands up and makes a formal announcement in Japanese, too fast and ceremonial for me to understand. The Japanese men in the room all applaud politely, then go back to fingering their cocks outside of their underwear. The American looks on in mild bemusement, taking swigs from the champagne bottle.
To get the guys excited, Kazumi lifts me up from behind, holding me on either side under the knees, shows my panty cameltoe off to the guys standing in a circle around me. The only one who makes much of an expression is the one fat guy who came in toward the end. The others just stare blankly and continue to play with themselves nervously. No one’s taken their cocks out yet. One of those peer pressure situations where each one is waiting for the others to go first.
Kazumi splays me flat on my back, plays with my tits. They’re much bigger than what Japanese men are used to, though not enormous. The combination of big tits and bald head turns a lot of them on. (Again, a gay thing.) Kazumi starts sucking on my nipples. It feels really good, I like Kazumi, I don’t have to pretend that I’m enjoying it like I normally do. By the time he moves to my lips, I’m actually turned on. The men in the room all staring.
The guys are all wearing different underwear. I make a quick study. For Japanese men, black briefs are the standard for some reason. The minimal aesthetic, I guess. A couple wear boxers. The American Paymaster, I think, probably isn’t wearing any at all. He still has his robe on.
My mom was someone who made t-shirts for a living. Her specialty was natural disasters. When I was growing up, whenever something catastrophic happened anywhere in the country—hurricanes, tornados, tropical storms, droughts, floods, nor’easters, you name it—whenever there was a natural disaster that did significant damage and made all the national headlines, my mother would pack me and my little sister up in her car and off we’d go. That’s how I saw and learned about America: touring through its natural disasters. Well, the aftermath. It ensured that I saw every place at its worst, its people at their most downtrodden. It was a good business, but maybe not the best for our education, my sister and I—we had to miss a lot of school. Thankfully, we both had enough brains to study on our own and ace it. So the school didn’t even say anything to my mother about all our absences. All they care about is test scores, anyway.
Disasters and profitability. People, after all, like to have a memento whenever they manage to survive something on a national newsworthy scale. They always give these catastrophes human names, so as to anthropomorphize them, I guess. Hurricane David. Tropical Storm Larry. Tsunami Margot. Desert Drought Dinah. Forest Fire Bettina. Making it real easy to create a t-shirt out of them. You really need a good name in order to make it a memorable t-shirt. One that will sell. Mom used to clean up. She didn’t even need a storefront. Just sold them out of the trunk of our Volkswagen. It was a cash business, like the one I’m in now. The key is to have just a simple design, one that will go viral, in today’s language, though we didn’t have terms like that back then. We didn’t even have the internet to rely on, the web was just in its infancy. It was all word of mouth. You have one design, but you screenprint it in many different colors. So as to individualize. People like to feel as though something special has happened to them. And that they can advertise it on their chests in the aftermath. Wearing it like that brings a form of pride.
Tattoos not meant to be seen. Natural disasters meant to be worn. Underwear all black except for a single pair of unfashionable white briefs—salaryman, of course. Kazumi rubbing my clit through the underwear. Turned on and yet simultaneously numb to the arousal. I can barely feel a thing.
Whoring makes you frigid, someone warned me back when I was first starting out, a girlfriend I went to grad school with. She’d done it her first year at Barnard, then got bored with it, or else busy, I forget which. Didn’t like what it was doing to her head. One of the reasons she’d started doing it is because she’d always loved sex, figured this was a way she could get more of it and paid on top, what couldn’t be good about it. Now she found it difficult to attain orgasm even when she was alone masturbating. She and I are different. I never liked sex all that much to begin with. Not that I ever hated it. It was always just more of an intellectual than a bodily thing for me. I don’t have a man’s appetite for it, like certain women do. Those girls who like to fuck all night long and never get bored with it. I’d just as rather roll over and go to sleep after thirty, forty-five minutes max—even if I don’t attain climax. I have the ability to detach. Some women don’t. My whore friend, she also didn’t like it when the guys stuck around after, and being a whore made it worse. I kind of don’t mind being in a relationship every now and again, as long as the guy knows his boundaries and knows when to shut the fuck up. But not many guys want a long-term thing with a whore. And the ones who do are usually whores themselves—even if they don’t do it for money.
Kazumi takes charge. As he takes out his prick, I hear my phone ringing in my handbag across the room. I forgot to put it on silent. Who could be calling this late. Must be past two, three in the morning. Maybe mom. She always forgets about the time zone difference. Kazumi’s prick is hard when he takes it out. The other guys soon follow suit: monkey see, monkey do.
Mom always said I should be a lawyer. I would have been good at it. Instead, I turned out to be a humanities girl. Which is like a half-assed lawyer, in essence. A sophisticated argumentative bitch with no money. What would I be if I wasn’t here right now, fingering my pussy. Boxer shorts go down, hit the floor. I wonder which one of these jerks will be the first. Raise my glance above crotch level to get a good look at their faces. I have to bite my inner cheek to stop from laughing. I don’t know. It’s not any one of them in particular. I guess it’s just all men.
My laughter must spurn something in the fat one, he’s the first to step forward. I inch my face next to his stubby cock because I have the intuition he’s not going to be much of a squirter. It’s kind of a letdown for the client if the first load doesn’t hit. My prediction turns out to be right. Thankfully there’s not much to be said for the volume, either; just a dab on the left cheek that can be readily wiped away with a smile-grimace. I have no dimples for it to get stuck in.
What does he expect anyway, some honey-sucking gobbler. You get what you pay for at three a.m. Actually I’m selling myself short here. He’s getting quite a lot; Tokyo’s big and you can get pretty much whatever you want here, but a bald white girl with tits for a bukkake scene at this hour—well, I should probably be charging more. Moments like this, when awarenesses like that start creeping in, I have to remind myself that it’s also research. That I’m actually getting more from them than they are from me. Anyway. A rich bastard like this. I will likely get a huge tip.
Then Kazumi splatters. Droplets rain down, about half of them miss me entirely, a couple splatter just above my tits, one big gob on the forehead. Wow Kazumi. Either you’re real turned on or else it’s been a real long time.
It usually goes like clockwork in these scenarios. Monkey see, monkey do—or am I repeating myself now? As soon as they see another guy cumming, it sets them off. Closet cases. The boy-lookalike girl is just here as an excuse for them to look at each other’s squirting dicks. Make whatever comparisons they need to. An elaborate ruse, and it works every time. At least one can hope. The worst is when there are two or three who can’t cum, who take forever to blast it. Because you really have to wait for them till the sun rises with the other guys’ stuff crusting on you.
Looking over at the client, what’s his name. He still has his robe on, hasn’t bothered to take out his wand. Clearly playing with it under the fabric, bouncity bounce. But I get it. He wants to watch all the action, be the last to blow. Who wouldn’t? It’s his hotel room. Not like he wants to shoot and then sit around waiting for all these other slobs to blow. He paid for a show, now he’s getting one.
We were on the road a lot. I remember this one town in North Carolina, near the coast, it must have been after a hurricane. This boy my age comes walking toward me, his face was all fucked up. I must have been fifteen, he was twelve. We found out later he’d been helping his dad clear trees in the yard after the storm, he was walking over an overturned trunk when he slipped and fell, fucked up his face. It was actually just heavily bruised. I thought that bruised face was the most beautiful I’d ever seen. Been a bruise enthusiast ever since. I wouldn’t call it a fetish. Not like I have to have it around me constantly. But I can appreciate rare beauty when I find it. It’s just that there’s nothing like a fucked-up face. Even when it’s deliberately fucked with. My first boyfriend over here, his face was full of piercings. Couldn’t even make out properly, he’d always give me a mouth full of metal. But I loved it. Face tattoos, also. The Marquesan islands, the Maori of New Zealand… That’s something that yakuzas never do. Never any tattoos above the neck. But a fucked-up face. Give me that any day over conventional good looks.
I thought about that little boy’s fucked-up face, that image that has been burned into my mind, some more while someone else came on me. Then another, right after that. I’m no longer looking up at their faces. Just thinking of the little boy’s instead. I lose count pretty soon, go into a sort of daze. That always happens. Once I had to do a bukkake with like forty guys. After three or four of them blow, you sort of stop paying attention. You just have to separate from your body. So as not to notice the disgust you’re enduring. You’ve become an object by this point anyway. Might as well imitate one.
It’s the middle of the afternoon over there. That’s why mom’s calling. She’s so absentminded. I occupy a sort of middle zone, living between the extremes of the two, east and west. As good as any description of Tokyo. This place is blasted. It’s not what it was, the golden era was like what, the ‘80s. Or the ‘60s or something. Now, it’s all aging infrastructure. Guys like these standing around me who’ve all seen and done way too much. Who have been corrupted both by the lack and the torments that have been inflicted upon tradition. A tradition whose lineage they all know, though they cannot begin to comprehend the ways in which it determines their everyday behavior, their impulses.
After this, I’ll go out into the streets brushed by morning’s first rays, maybe pass by a face or two that I used to know. Where does all the money come from? That’s a question she seldom asks me anymore. She just knows I have something going over here. Something that’s not a t-shirt business. And so she’ll tell me about shit at home. She doesn’t bother asking too many questions anymore. Never once has dared to visit. She somehow senses the value inherent in staying away.
Another of these closet gays cums on me. There was a time I was innocent, I reflected, a time when I didn’t even know what being a whore is. On the highways of rural America, mom and my sister in the backseat with all those boxes of shirts. Staying at chain motels, eating at highway diners. We’d go to truck stops sometimes. They’d flirt with my mom, always in an innocent way. No man ever tried to touch me until I got to college. By then, I wasn’t so innocent anymore. It didn’t take me long to figure out what I wanted.
By now, I’m covered in jizz and feeling numb, dead inside. I’m beyond wanting this all to be over. More that I’m in a place where time has stopped. All this wasted sperm on my body. Think things like: All substance is ultimately waste. Sperm not different from shit or piss or blood, marrow. In this respect, I am waiting.
Do any of these guys have girlfriends. People stumble about in a state of confusion, going from one person to another, never sure of their emotions—it’s the Japanese way. It didn’t take long to figure that out after moving here. Any guy I wanted, I could have my way with him. Not like it wasn’t the same in America. But here, there’s a sort of brazenness in the endeavor. I can’t call it sexism. I never went in much for the cavalier bullshit—it’s always fake, even when done well.
The client is last to bust. Exactly how it was planned. By now some of the jizz has hardened into a sort of glaze. It’s supposed to be good for the skin, I don’t mind. All this protein leaking into my pores. I have my eyes closed because I don’t want to get any stuff in it, I squint the left one open to see him breathlessly going at it, the hog. Finally he exhales strongly and shoots a thick spatter right across my nose and lips. Just as he does so, the room key sounds, the door opens, in walks a middle-aged white woman. I wipe the stuff off my face to reveal an oh-shit expression written across his.
–Oh, Mrtol!… What the hell? What the hell are you doing here???… Um… I would like to introduce you, this is my good friend Tanya.
TRAVIS JEPPESEN is the author of ten books, including The Suiciders, Victims, and See You Again in Pyongyang. He has contributed articles to The New York Times Magazine, Artforum, Mousse, Wall Street Journal, The Believer, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and other media. An accomplished art critic, he is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. His calligraphic and text-based artwork has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Wilkinson Gallery (London), Exile (Berlin), and Rupert (Vilnius), and featured in group exhibitions internationally. Jeppesen curates a living archive of his work at travisjeppesen.substack.com.
