But I couldn't stop. I think the main reason had to do with the "true" relationship in my life, which was suffering from my boyfriend's and my cohabitation. I felt that my customers could somehow protect me from the emotional wounds inflicted by my lover. Their adoration validated me, so I didn't have to rely on my real relationship for self-esteem. This armor, I thought, might be what could save the love I cared about.

I was still living in a dream world at this point, but I couldn't help realizing the moral ambiguity of my position. For a while, a when-in-Rome attitude kept me going. In the beginning, I just told myself that the hostess/geisha system was centuries old, and that the men who were my clients well knew how it worked. If they became too emotionally involved and got hurt, that was their problem, because they couldn't have had any illusions about the situation at Verdor -- a place that was all illusion.

This was how most of the hostesses around me felt, especially the ones who had been in the business a long time. One night, after carefully explaining how she was plotting to manipulate her best customer to get more money out of him, Amanda -- a highly educated hostess -- sighed, then shrugged. "I was never like this before. But this is the game you have to play. I make a lot of money and get to travel the world. That's what's important to me now."

I played the same game for a time: I plotted which customer to call when; calculated how to portray myself as a romantic possibility to the men while keeping my distance; memorized my customers' likes and dislikes as to karaoke, drinks, conversation and dress.

In the spring, after hostessing for a total of five-and-a-half months, I started to break down, snapping at customers when they became condescending or lewd. "How big is your vagina?" a new customer might ask, demonstrating various sizes with his fingers.

"How big is your penis? Pretty small, I bet," I'd retort.

"What?" The great thing about being rude is that the men can't, at first, believe that they're hearing insults from you. As the paying customers, they expect to be treated as deferentially as gods. So they assume, if you're speaking English, that they haven't heard you correctly and, if you're speaking Japanese, that you've just made a mistake. But eventually they get it.

One time I snapped at a customer right in front of the club manager. He didn't reprimand me afterward, though he looked less than pleased. His silence surprised me at first, but I soon guessed what was up: Midori's two most important customers were crazy about me. Until my erratic behavior became a huge liability, the manager couldn't really do anything to me. I had at least that power.

But pretty soon I was crying regularly on the way home from work, as sympathetic taxi drivers tried to comfort me. I yearned for the day when I could return to the safe if laborious world of graduate school (that's when you know you're desperate). At first the job had made me stronger and more self-confident, but now I realized it was just making my heart harder.

It was also changing me in ways I was unable to see. One night I went out for drinks with a male friend I had known for years, and I realized that he was looking at me with horror. "What?" I asked. As soon as we started talking, he told me, everything about my comportment changed: My voice became lower, my movements more languid, my laugh more provocative.

It wasn't that I was trying to seduce him; it was just that my hostessing persona had become so second nature that it overcame me whenever I was in a similar environment. Spooked, I felt like I had been possessed by a demon temptress. The lines between my work self and my "normal" self were blurring. I liked being able to toy with different personae, but I needed to be able to control them.

I knew there was a real problem when my boyfriend, a South American Casanova with no short list of past lovers, told me that I had a problem with commitment. "What do you want from me?" I retorted. "It's my job to pretend that I'm in love with a different man every night!"

During my painful breakup with this man, I relied on my customers for a great deal of emotional support and validation -- even though they knew nothing about my personal life. Their sham "love" soothed the wounds of heartbreak, especially because I knew the fantasy that was my work held no danger for my heart.

My customers reminded me, in true Buddhist fashion, that the passions of this world really are an illusion. This was a valuable lesson. Now I feel better able to continue with school -- I think I can take it all a little less seriously and a bit more pleasurably.

Finally, however, I couldn't deny what I had known for a while: Hostessing was no longer worth doing. It had started as well-paid glamour, but it had become a nightmare in which my customers and I tried to outwit each other through a fake courtship. I pretended that I loved them so I could get money, and they pretended that they loved me so they could get sex. They would be content with innocent companionship only for so long, and I figured I might as well get out before I lost all of them. I dreaded failing at even so pathetic a profession as hostessing. So I quit, telling Midori I had to return to school in California.

I really did care about my customers in my own way. And I confess that I miss hostessing sometimes. It was like a dream -- perfect at its height, restless and nightmarish near daybreak. I still get e-mails from several of my customers. They tell me how much they miss me, how they have no one to talk to since I left, how they get nostalgic when they hear certain songs on the karaoke system. Their notes, at once absurd and sincere, touch me. I write them back when I can, because I can't just leave them to their loneliness. I feel that it's still my job to look after them, even from far away.

To my own disbelief, I took one last stab at the whole thing last fall, in America. Call me a glutton for exquisite servitude. Mr. Tanaka, one of my former customers, came to Los Angeles for an annual aviation conference. I accepted his offer to fly me to L.A. for the weekend and put me up at the Bonaventure. Just to be safe, I took along a male friend and stashed him in my bathroom whenever Tanaka knocked on the door. Although such capers provided some comic relief, I was miserable for most of the two days. Hostessing just did not translate into my own culture, and I spent much of the weekend wondering what the other men at the conference thought my position was. Luckily, Tanaka was a perfect gentleman. And he never discovered my stowaway.

Even with that failed experiment, I still occasionally miss the sweet deception and intensity of hostessing, the experience of a love affair stripped clean of any mundane concerns. The relationship between a hostess and her customer is commitment without complications, magic without disappointments. But ultimately, though hostessing can make ordinary love seem less exciting, it also highlights how tender less manipulated relationships can be, and how much more redemptive.

Maybe someday I could hostess again, but I doubt it. Being in love with one person is hard enough. And maybe it is enough, after all.

Private Life Romance, relationships, and the personal side of Table Talk