The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief

Storyline

The whole story, ending included.

Inside an Osaka host club: the men who sell love and the women, many of them sex workers, who buy it.

The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief is a documentary by Jake Clennell, who produced, directed and shot it; it competed at the Slamdance festival in January 2006. It stays almost entirely in and around Café Rakkyo, a host club in Osaka, where sharp-dressed young men are paid to keep women company: to talk, flirt, listen and, above all, to have them order champagne at hundreds of dollars a bottle.

At its centre is Issei, 22, the club's owner and star host, who has some twenty young men under his training and earns about 50,000 dollars a month. 'For girls, we are products,' he says. 'We sell dreams.' The film follows the hosts touting for customers in the street, a newcomer being interviewed for a job, and the monthly race to be the club's top earner; only one host in a hundred, Issei says, lasts more than a year. His regulars speak on camera about loving him. One says she would die for him. Another explains that she will win him simply by spending more, while the film cuts to Issei's disdain. He says he often avoids sleeping with clients, because afterwards they tend to leave, and that a host who develops needs of his own cannot do the job. 'To a certain extent, money can buy love,' he says.

Only gradually does the film reveal that most of the women are themselves sex workers, spending on men paid to love them what they earn by selling sex. Some hosts admit to pangs of guilt. Issei admits that after so much pretending he is not always sure which of his personalities is his own. At dawn the hosts stumble out of the club into daylight, and Issei goes home, wondering whether he will ever marry.