There are many words that can be used to describe Club 9, but the one I keep coming back to is adorable. Haruo "Hello" Hattori, the country girl who is becoming a sensation as a club girl in the Ginza district, is so earnest and so sweet, without coming across as gullible or stupid, that it's hard not to fall completely in love with her. Given that the story is often about how she charms the "big fish" into spending a lot of money at Club 9, it is of the utmost importance that Kobayashi convey this feeling about the character. With the setup out of the way in the first volume, Kobayashi is free to spend a little time on the details of working at the club, including a three-part tale about how to avoid a client who gets a little too amorous and several self-contained tales of big clients coming into the club. Each story is a lot of fun, and works even if you're not all that familiar with Japanese culture, as well as continuing the story of Haruo, and keeping up the intriguing question of whether she'll eventually settle into her big city life or will go back to her country life, as she promised.
The occupation that Kobayashi is depicting here seems to have some borderline sleazy overtones to it. The role of the club girl seems not unlike that of a topless dancer here in America, someone whose job it is to sell sex without actually prostituting herself in the role. However, the book requires that Haruo come across as sweet and fairly innocent as well as sexy, which is a difficult line to tread. Kobayashi must make us believe that men would spend enormous amounts of money to drink with these women, while not portraying them as the type of women who will go home with the men for all the money they spend.
The first story in this trade goes a long way toward making their employment more believable, showing the inevitable after-effects of alcohol, sensuality and fake intimacy, and Kobayashi gives a few moments of real scares as Haruo is pursued into her apartment building by an increasingly angrier client. Fortunately, Haruo comes off as clever and calm, and the end result, which sees the client punished for his rude and aggressive behavior by a massive scandal, is played for laughs. And somehow, it works, because nobody gets hurt, and even the psychological damage that would be done by such an attempted attack in real life is downplayed effectively the style of the storytelling.
Kobayashi gets some mileage out of the other girls besides Haruo in this story. Mama's almost mercenary tendencies in happily packing the girls off into cabs says a lot about her, and her protective instincts toward her girls soften her mercenary side so that it's funny and endearing rather than predatory. Aki's obsession with flair and style gets a nice nod when she picks up a smooth new car. And Chinatsu's reaction to alcohol is hilarious, even moreso the second time it happens, thanks in no small part to Kobayashi's visual presentation of Chinatsu drawing on her client.
While the other girls are fun, though, this is and probably always will be Haruo's story. Her affection for baseball, which is sort of a surrogate affection for her boyfriend, is just another adorable part of her personality, and Kobayashi plays off it well in a couple stories this time out. He shows just how determined and charming she can be when she talks a wildly drunk baseball star, who she sort of idolizes by proxy, into giving up his drinking for the night. And he shows her generous nature along with her amusingly naive side with the way she treats the CEO; it's not hard to see why he would seek her out, and it'll be interesting to see if he's the nice guy he seems to be, and if so, how that will tempt Haruo in regards to staying faithful to her boyfriend.
