In When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Mikio Naruse draws us into a world often intimated in movies but rarely ever fleshed out: that of the Japanese bar hostess. A postwar offshoot of the Geisha tradition, these bars serviced men through the company of women and the comfort of drink. Forty years on, and the mizo shobai, or “water trade”, has come to evolve once more: catering exclusively for female clientele, somewhere deep within Osaka’s nightlife district resides Café Rakkyo, a club occupied by an elite brethren of ‘host boys’, and their magnetic, if ultimately tragic leader, Issei. Like Naruse’s mama-san Keiko, Issei’s patience as head host and self-confessed love thief is tested daily: the vigilance of fashion and appearance; the harvesting and feigning of relationships; the constant drunken nights out; the necessity of shrewd business instinct. Cultural change however has given birth to a new monster entirely, and The Great Happiness Space gets under the skin of what on the surface appears to be just another throwaway leisure pursuit of the rich and emotionally needy.

While the film’s crushing irony needn’t be divulged, what’s plain to see is the vicious cycle imposed, with Café Rakkyo’s hosts operating with all the guile of a Nigerian fraudster, selling the promise of love to sell more drinks, and dangling a carrot of false affection by night’s end. Ensuring clients return with more money and more false hope, these rent boys clearly leave their mark as sharks – not urban celebrities or entertainers – even if director Jake Clennell insists his documentary is of the nonjudgmental variety. Its final verdict is damning and sour tasting. Knocking off after another arduous evening’s work, Issei stumbles onto the city streets; blinded by the morning light, he crawls back home exhausted, and into bed. Moments earlier, he’s slandered a particularly clingy client; a woman who’s caused great discomfort for Osaka’s Number #1 Host. Of course, if Issei – best described as of the same effeminate, hair-sprayed male ilk that Rinko Kikuchi picked up in Babel – took a second to look away from the camera/mirror, he’d realize who the real victims were. Whether addicted, gullible, or openly vulnerable, all are women seemingly emancipated by financial independence, yet even with the roles reversed, are still trapped like Naruse’s bar hostesses in a cruel state of servitude.—Tim Wong