Youth Kabukicho

My Eternal Flame

Shinjuku, Kabukicho. A town that taught me every love and every hatred from the bottom of my heart and the depths of my soul. It was a five-year period of contradictions where I loved people with all my desire and hated them enough to want to curse them. Those I loved with all my body and soul, those I hurt, those I watched pass away, those who taught me to work hard, and those who taught me how to earn money. I want to thank every host I met during those five years.

The Kuyakusho-dori street visible from Yasukuni-dori is so, so filled with desire. Once you enter Kuyakusho-dori, it is as if you have been caught in a vortex of desire, and you lose control of both mind and body. The view of Kuyakusho-dori from Shokuan-dori tells the story of how distorted it is, as if it were another world. I realized I had been in a place like this for five years. I realized how well I had managed to survive. Having passed through that long, long, pitch-black tunnel, I once again realized the weight of the various events of the past.

May 13, 2023. The day I clearly realized that the desire-filled town of Kabukicho was no longer my place. For the first time this year, a certain event led me to step into a host club. At first, I was so nervous about going to a host club for the first time in six months that my legs felt weak. Just facing Kuyakusho-dori made me feel like I was going to have a seizure, and I spent nearly an hour in a vacant shop before the intersection debating whether to go or not. For someone like me, who once made it a must to frequent host clubs five times a week, it was a shocking sight.

And the moment I stepped into the shop, it had already become an alien world to me. The atmosphere of the shop, the hosts, and the customers—everything was so nakedly lustful that it gave me goosebumps. It felt as if a long film called "Youth Kabukicho" was projecting the me from six months ago right in front of my eyes. To the me of six months ago, a host club was a dreamland like Disneyland, where dopamine flowed freely. And when I visited for the first time in half a year, I couldn't judge calmly whether I had changed or if the door I opened had randomly led to a parallel world; it was such a bizarre space. However, I realized that being able to think of it as an alien world was proof of my own growth. That alien world taught me the measure of my growth through a fictional long film.

I was able to deeply feel how much I had grown and how immature I had been, and for some reason, I felt happy. The moment I thought that, even though the end time hadn't arrived, I left only the money and bolted from the shop with the momentum of someone riding a tiger. I had truly graduated from Kabukicho. With a feeling as lighthearted as a young girl, I ran through Kuyakusho-dori as if skipping in my heart. That Kuyakusho-dori looked completely different from the one I had passed through just an hour ago. The street that had been so distorted it almost gave me a seizure suddenly looked as vivid as if it were draped in an aurora. And, shedding all the grime of my sorrow, I grew wings and dove into that aurora.

On the train ride home, I listened to the Bangles' "Eternal Flame," and a hidden smile and a few tears overflowed at the same time. The joy of that day was so overwhelming that I could barely contain it.

Kabukicho, which was the entirety of my youth. These lyrics condense and speak for my five years of youth. It was so, so long, to the point where those five years felt like a quarter of a century. This is because three months in Kabukicho are understood by the people of Kabuki as one year—an unspoken unit of time. A town where time, space, and love are all in a different dimension. That is Kabukicho. It was also Kabukicho that taught me about living, loving, and all of youth—my "Eternal Flame."

Thank you for finding me. Thank you for meeting me. To the host I was assigned to, whom I loved and hated so much.