Creta Kano becomes a prostitute

Creta Kano becomes a prostitute after an unexplained change in her body makes her pain disappear. Although she has not abandoned her intention to die, curiosity about a life without pain leads her to postpone suicide; needing to repay debts of more than three million yen, she chooses prostitution as a way to obtain money quickly. What begins as a temporary means of survival becomes an account of profound numbness and of coercion by a criminal organization.

Decision and Circumstances

Creta explains that she had been free of pain since an accident: ordinary aches and menstrual cramps had stopped, and even a broken rib caused little discomfort. She cannot explain the change. Rather than treating her continued life as a settled decision, she describes it as provisional: she wants to discover what living without pain means, while believing she can still die whenever she chooses. Her curiosity, not a newfound confidence in the future, keeps her alive for the time being.

That decision creates an immediate practical problem. To go on living, she says, she must repay what she owes, a sum exceeding three million yen. Prostitution appears to her to be the only means she knows of raising the money quickly. She regards the choice against the prospect of death: selling her body seems to her a lesser matter than dying, and she reports having no hesitation. The work is therefore tied both to debt and to her experiment in continuing a life she does not yet intend to preserve permanently.

Independent Work and Emotional Numbness

Creta later dates the beginning of this period to six years earlier, in May 1978, when she was twenty. The timing coincides with the month Toru Okada and Kumiko Okada married. She starts independently, approaching men in an area with many bars, agreeing on a price, and going to a hotel. She says that sex brings neither physical pain nor pleasure; she experiences it as a bodily act without feeling, and feels no guilt about accepting money for it.

The absence of feeling becomes the experience she is trying to confirm. The money initially has a concrete purpose: she makes close to a million yen during her first month and calculates that she could repay the debt within three or four months. She returns from campus, works in the evening, and is home by ten, telling her parents that she is waiting tables. To avoid raising suspicion by returning too much money at once, she gives her father 100,000 yen a month and saves the rest. Yet she says that the accumulated money eventually matters less than the proof it affords her of her own numbness.

Coercion and Changed Conditions

One night, while approaching men near a station, Creta is seized by two gang members and taken to their local headquarters. They use a recording of their assault, along with her student identification, to threaten exposure to her parents and demand that she work for their organization. They warn that refusing would bring blackmail, and present organized work as protection from police attention and the risks of soliciting independently. Creta agrees, telling them she does not care what they do; she says that at the time nothing mattered to her.

The arrangement changes how she works and how much she earns. The organization takes seventy percent of her income, but finds clients and assigns her to appointments, generally in first-class hotels or condominiums rather than the less respectable hotels used by some other women in its employ. She is usually sent one or two clients in an evening, often older men, and receives weekly pay as well as individual tips. Some clients make unusual requests, which she accepts; she saves her earnings in several accounts, but describes the money as rows of figures rather than something meaningful. These details show that the apparent order and relative selectivity of her assignments do not make the arrangement voluntary: they follow the threats that forced her into the organization.

Significance of the Episode

Creta’s account links a bodily change to a choice that is both purposeful and precarious. The disappearance of pain does not resolve her crisis; it makes continued life an object of curiosity while leaving her expectation of eventual suicide intact. Prostitution supplies a practical route to repay her debt, but her own emphasis falls increasingly on the absence of feeling rather than on financial independence or pleasure.

The gang’s intervention sharpens the distinction between her initial decision and what follows it. Creta first chooses prostitution as a temporary way to obtain money; the organization then uses threats against her and her family to take control of her work. Her blunt indifference should not be mistaken for the absence of coercion: it is the emotional condition she describes during this period, while the threat of exposure and extortion establishes the limits placed on her choice. The episode thus presents numbness as lived experience and as the condition through which both an initially self-directed decision and subsequent exploitation are narrated.