パパ活女子 幻冬舎新書

Content warnings: some explicit discussions of sex, sex work, domestic violence, light discussion of teen/underage sex work but in the context of distinguishing it from the topic of the book

What's it about: This book is about パパ活 which is largely equivalent to the Western phenomenon of 'sugaring' (sugar daddies, sugar babies).

Review: This book was really interesting, but I sometimes felt like he was likely exaggerating things, and upon talking to a Japanese female friend, he most certainly was and that may be a trend in his books. The way he talks the majority of young women in Japan are engaging in パパ活, albeit with a large contingent trying to be 茶飯女子 (women who are paid for conversation rather than sex). She said since he writes quite a bit about sex work, he's lost sight of the fact that to many people it's not a common fact of life and not everyone is engaging in it.

I'll also note he writes from an almost exclusively economic perspective, which can sometimes come off as callous. I don't think he actually is based on a few strongly worded non-economics focused paragraphs, but be aware some passages will read rather harsh.

You do get some more human elements (as opposed to strictly economic) from the interviews he does with the women, but his commentary after the fact can be eyebrow raising.

Language learning: Quite a bit of finance vocab, some 'adult' vocab, some legal vocab. A lot of the book is interviews which tend to be pretty easy to follow, but other sections you'll want to focus more as they're essay-like. I think it's a good mix of everyday Japanese and more formal written Japanese so long as the content matter doesn't bother you.