Letter to Usagi Nakamura

What I wish to tell Usagi Nakamura.

On “Hitting Bottom” in Addiction

On July 4, 2019, in Ueno’s Ameyoko, I happened upon a sign for a meeting café called Kirari. From that first accidental encounter until the end of December 2021, I passed through the lives of 289 young women, mostly university students around the age of twenty, many of them sustaining themselves through what is euphemistically called papa-katsu in order to repay their student loans.

I plunged headlong, relentlessly, to the very limits of endurance. When I finally broke, it felt as though my mind and finances had been blown apart by dynamite, reduced to scattered fragments. At the same time, every relationship surrounding me, professional and private alike, collapsed in all directions. I self-destructed completely.

Before I ever knew this world, I regarded media reports on “impoverished young women” or “college students in the sex industry” as stories about people inhabiting a universe utterly unrelated to mine. The phenomenon called papa-katsu, framed as a new youth culture or social symptom, was foreign territory to me. I doubted such reports: could academically capable university students truly turn to selling sex, even under financial strain? And yet, my curiosity, my desire to see the reality with my own eyes, was unusually strong. At the same time, I was, quite simply, interested in young and attractive female students, though I had no idea how to enter that world.

Looking back, my life had already traced a cycle of gambling addiction, collapse, rebirth; alcohol addiction (including an obsession with Philippine pubs), collapse, rebirth. Within the so-called male triad of desires—drink, gamble, buy—I had already experienced enough agony in the realm of “buying,” of commercial sex. Still, at fifty-eight, nearing sixty, I opened a Pandora’s box I had no need to open: an extraordinary, unnecessary world.

My abnormal fixation on the female students who frequented meeting cafés, and the violent sexual impulses that accompanied it, spiraled beyond any restraint. I found myself sliding day by day into a bottomless swamp, accelerating toward becoming a social ruin, incapable of sustaining ordinary life. In desperation, I sought help at Enomoto Hospital in Ikebukuro, the only medical institution in Japan specializing in sexual addiction. I was diagnosed with “compulsive sexual addiction,” attended several self-help groups, and underwent rehabilitation programs.

Yet I could not believe that their treatment policy—absolute abstinence, prohibition of masturbation, strict avoidance of entire city zones associated with meeting cafés (Ueno, Ikebukuro, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Omiya, Yokohama, Kawasaki), and the declaration that any sexual activity outside marriage or a committed relationship was immoral—could possibly cure my addiction. I am a four-times-divorced man with no partner. From morning to night, I was assaulted by burning compulsive fantasies: If I go now, a fated encounter with an angelic college girl must be waiting. Don’t hesitate. Go immediately. I could not resist them.

Slowly, I consumed the 12 million yen I had earned trading Chinese hanging scrolls. I lost all interest in appraising artworks or collecting treasures as a dealer in Chinese calligraphy and painting. Concentration became impossible. Dimly, I sensed that this intense sexual addiction and the resulting collapse of my life were unavoidable. I had survived three cycles of ruin and rebirth before, but a fourth collapse, at my age, felt final. If I fell into the swamp again, I knew I would never climb out. An endless, opaque despair began to stain my thoughts.

By October 2021, I was like a terminal drug addict beyond control. Sleepwalking, I gathered 4.5 million yen from bank loans and three consumer lenders, holed up in my favorite Kabukicho love hotel, LISTO, and indulged endlessly in desire for young women from morning until night. On good days, I met four women a day. By then, I had entirely lost interest in orgasm itself. I believed, desperately, that the longer I remained physically fused with someone, even for a second, the more I could escape my fear of collapse and death. I trembled at the thought of the final moment.

In Kabukicho, each second felt like the climax of my life. The city seemed drenched entirely in pink. I often met women beneath the TOHO building, beneath the giant Godzilla head. I was so consumed by the women that I failed to notice it for some time. When its roar finally drew my gaze and our eyes “met,” I felt an inexplicable embarrassment, a sudden shame, as if jolted back from complete escapism. That moment still feels like yesterday.

After spending every last yen, I told myself that only by throwing myself onto the Saikyo Line—the railway I used most frequently—and annihilating both myself and the uncontrollable beast of desire nesting inside me could salvation exist. I wandered straight toward death, groaning like a dying animal.

As expected, I became penniless, unable even to pay utilities, trembling before debt collectors. Searching blindly for an exit—or an end—to terminal sexual addiction, I lay unable to rise. In that instant, I devoured your books: Sex Wanderings and your other “pathological” works.

Your words were magical. They soaked into me like water into a vast desert. It felt as if every line entered my veins via an IV drip and danced through my bloodstream. In my dopamine-saturated brain, your texts acted like a seal on desire, freezing the neural command center that launched sexual impulses. My brain was gently paralyzed, resuscitated, and given rest. I lay beneath the futon, unable to move, as if hallucinating my gradual return to a rational mind.

At the same time, I found the emotional space to look back on my own wandering through meeting cafés.

Thank you.

With gambling and alcohol addiction—specifically my addiction to shochu Kinmiya—I fought my obsessions head-on, pouring money and time into them until they exhausted themselves and lost all meaning. Through that experience, I came to understand “hitting bottom” as something felt viscerally, not abstractly. That is why I became deeply interested in the relationship between the sensation of bottoming out and one’s inner state.

Those three months in Kabukicho, from morning to night, living as a beast incarnate among angels, may have brought me closest to the bottom. The book that revealed this to me, the one that became my Bible, was your Sex Wanderings.

March 20, 2022