torment in silence, for the sake of my son. If I failed to obey their orders, the photographs would be sent to every name in my address book.A month later I was living in a single windowless room in a Buraku area of Osaka. I was indentured to a brothel, and I was not allowed to leave the building or have any contact with the outside world, beyond sex with my customers. You may doubt that sexual enslavement is practised in twenty-first century Japan. Your ignorance is enviable, but your disbelief is precisely why such enslavement can prosper unchecked. I myself would have doubted that ‘respectable’ women could be turned into prostitutes, but the owners are masters of control. I was dispossessed of every item from my old life which could have reminded me who I was – except my son. I was allowed to keep my son – this prevented me from escaping by suicide. My customers not only knew about my imprisonment, they derived pleasure from it, and would have been implicated in the crime had it become public. The final wall between me and the real world was perhaps the strongest: a phenomenon psychologists label ‘hostage syndrome’ – the conviction that my fate was deserved and that no ‘crime’ was being perpetrated. After all, I was a ‘whore’ now – what right did I have to bring shame to my old friends or even to my mother by appealing for assistance? Better that they carry on believing I had disappeared overseas with my bankrupt husband. Six other women, three with babies younger than my son, shared my floor. The man who raped me was our pimp – it was to him we had to beg for food, medicine, even nappies for our children. He also supplied narcotics, in careful quantities. He administered them personally to ensure we couldn’t overdose. We created fake names for ourselves, and in time our old lives became detached from what we had become. All of us dreamed of killing the owner at some vague point in the future after our escape, but all of us knew we would never dare return to Osaka. We were required to take care of each other’s children while their mothers were working. The pimp told us that after we had worked off the amounts the defaulting members of our families had embezzled we would be free to go, so the harder we worked to please our customers, the quicker we would be out of there. In autumn, a girl who had been working in the brothel for two years was released. So we thought.My ‘release’ came sooner, because over the following new year my resilience exhausted itself and I suffered a nervous breakdown. The customers complained to the pimp that I was no longer trying. The pimp talked to me for a while. He could be gentle when he chose. It was one of his weapons. He said he had talked to my creditors and that I would be transferred with my son to another branch that night. We drank gin and tonic to celebrate.I awoke wrapped in a blanket in a black airless place. My head was groggy and drugged. My son was not with me. I was still in my brothel nightshirt. For a terrible moment I thought I had been buried alive, but groping around, I realized I was in the boot of a stationary car. I found a jack, and finally forced an exit. I was in a lock-up garage. I saw the pimp’s reflection in the wing mirror and froze. He was asleep. Then I saw that his nose was missing. Someone had put a gun to his nostrils and pulled the trigger. There was no sign of my son. I ran – but before I had got out of the garage my senses began to return. I was lost, penniless, believed to have vanished by anyone who remembered me. My former owners would jump to the conclusion that I had been taken or killed by the same gang who killed my pimp. I hesitated – but I ran back, groped inside the pimp’s jacket for his wallet. I found a travel bag strapped around his groin. The bag contained a wad of ten-thousand-yen notes inches thick. I had never seen so much money. When I found my way out of the lock-up I found myself in the precincts of the vast Osaka central hospital, the only place in the city