Three Elephants and a Pimp

Her name is Rie, and she once dated a member of the Asian Pimps. The relationship has faded, though she talks about it like it was two days ago. "But I lost my boyfriend two years ago," she says, in a tone that suggests she has not yet fully recovered.

Her five-inch-tall stack of photos, held together by a hair scrunchy, features the former boyfriend more prominently than anyone except herself. One photo shows the couple on her birthday. She sighs, as her pair of fits-in-the-palm-of-your-hand dogs dart around the apartment oblivious to the somber mood. "Two years ago."

We met Rie, a friend of a friend from Ise who had traveled with us to the city, earlier in the day in Nagoya's trendy shopping district. After trudging through the area for an hour or so, I had managed only to buy a CD. Rie had three gigantic shopping bags. We later learned that one of her nicknames is "bag monster." It fit. I wondered how often she goes on such sprees. How can she afford it?

Maybe it's the three jobs. She works at Toyota in a department involving finance. She works at an unnamed location as a designer. She works three nights a week as a hostess, which requires further explanation.

Hostess bars, also known as snack bars, are incredibly popular among the men of Japan. A snack bar features drinks, often karaoke, and most importantly, young attractive women who engage you in conversation and pour your drinks. Of course, you're paying for the company. Normal operations are nothing too shady. It's not part of the sex trade, though the seedier options could probably be found in the same neighborhood. You pay for a nice-looking woman to sit with you and talk with you. The bill runs up, especially if you're like me and require a couple of drinks to actually enjoy the fake, sometimes dull atmosphere.

At any rate, based on how much I paid when I went to a snack bar with some teachers the other week, I imagine Rie makes plenty of spending money from this gig alone. She fits the part. A sometimes model, she's attractive and interesting to talk to. And, she paints.

As we prepared to watch her friend's live show at a tiny bar in another part of Nagoya, Rie told us about the three elephants. She had to paint three elephants, she said, without much more detail except that it was for an art class she takes. At her apartment, we discovered that she had already painted the three elephants, but had to finish up the project and perhaps try it all again. She filled in the white space around the elephants with a border made up of different degrees of gray. The elephants themselves, stacked on top of each other on one sheet of paper, were a variety of colors. The point wasn't to learn how to draw elephants, Rie stressed. The lesson was about color composition.

The mix of colors that made up the elephants seemed to fit for Rie, the hostess, the painter, the model, the former reggae DJ, the dog-owner, the bag-wielder, the designer, the office worker. There was so much going on in her life that it would be hard to image anyone painting her without using just as many colors. It's cliche, yes, but sometimes art mimics life ... even when it's just a lesson about colors.

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So instead of going to Matsusaka, Sam and Mami and I went to Nagoya, where we met Rie, who inspired the above sketch. She was quite a character so I took a stab and writing her down. Thanks for the comments on Halloween. Any more ideas out there?