A writer who spent a year closely interviewing a Kabukicho “koinky girl” who was “making 5 million yen at a soap shop” saw a “deep darkness.

It was midday in August, and the area around the Tokyo Metropolitan Health Plaza Hygeia and the adjacent Okubo Park in Shinjuku’s Kabukicho district was already a tourist attraction. Even though it was still early afternoon, women in their 20s and 30s were standing by the side of the street, and men who were looking for them were hanging out here and there, seemingly unattached to their surroundings.

This area, commonly known as “Kouen,” has become famous over the past year or so as a “street hooker zone” where, at night, there are more than 50 women standing around.

The media often talk about the freelancing of the sex industry, but I think it’s just a matter of the stage becoming more diverse. In the past it was the JK business, sex industry, dating cafes, or selling your body on dating sites, but now the most profitable spot – the stage – is “koukin”.

Nonfiction writer Mizuho Takagi, author of “Reporto Shinjuku Kabukicho: Street Prostitution” (Tetsujinsha, Inc.), says so. Takagi, who is known for her books on society and the sex industry, including “Prostitution Island: Report on Watarikanojima, the Last Peach Land,” has covered the area now known as “Kouen” many times over the past 20 years. He says that he was asked by an editor he knows to cover the area again this time because of the abundance of information on “kouen” in the media today.

To put it bluntly, I was tired of this kind of coverage. I didn’t want to do articles about what kind of girls were selling for how much, who they were paying off, and so on. So I decided to follow them closely, like a TV documentary.

Of course, it would be easy to just talk to them on the spot. But it is difficult to ask them anything more than that, and they don’t always tell you what they really think. Basically, all they do is lie. So many of them are like that. They are the kind of girls who would tell you that they used to be number one at a cabaret club or that they used to make 5 million yen at a soap opera, even though they don’t look like that kind of girl. If a girl says something outlandish that cannot be backed up, we don’t interview her or write about her story. That is why I think this book is filled with real stories.

It is even difficult to interview the “dating girls. For them, there is no merit in being interviewed at all, but rather only risk. In this book, Takagi closely follows a 31-year-old woman named Kotone for a year. Although she could earn 50,000 yen a day if she worked at a delicatessen, she almost never went to work, instead earning her money through dating cafes and “koryu” (companionship). Takagi had originally met her for tea when she was with an acquaintance, and they were acquainted with each other, but even so, the close interview was difficult.