Entering into the gray terrain of the sex industry in Japan today, Gabriele Koch has written a beautifully rich account of the contradictory nature of both the work for the women involved and the place this work assumes in the larger politico-economy of Japan. Based on sustained ethnographic research conducted between 2008 and 2013, mainly with sex workers but also at their places of work, with related personnel in the legal and political terrain, and with an anti-human-trafficking organization, Koch offers a deft analysis of the way sex work both skirts the law and is implanted in the very heart of Japan's postindustrial socio-economy. While prostitution is illegal, the selling of transactional sex is thriving nonetheless, assuming an ambiguous status that excludes sex workers from the protection of labor laws and stigmatizes their work. For this reason, many who enter the field do so claiming that they are only “amateurs.” What they perform in the way of “amateur sex” is a service seen, by themselves and by the customers they serve, as akin to “healing” (iyashi). In its gentleness of empathy and recognition, building up a man “to be a man,” healing has a productive value in an era of socioeconomic decline, decreasing job and marital security, and—for this and other reasons—imperiled masculinity. As Koch argues, this makes Japanese sex work today a form of feminized affective labor “deeply implicated in regimes of male precarity in postindustrial capitalism” (p. 120).

What I appreciate most in this fine book is Koch's attentiveness to the voices and lives of Japanese (female) sex workers. This is not a homogenous bunch, and the diversity of backgrounds, reasons for entering, and trajectories within sex work are handled with deftness and sensitivity. So is the point that Koch reiterates of the “ordinariness” (versus exceptionalism) by which women view their job choice motivated by the paucity of viable job options elsewhere in the workforce for Japanese women. Given that Japan still ranks near the bottom of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries in terms of gender parity in employment, choosing sex work is often motivated by the sheer pragmatics of the flexibility, autonomy, and pay the job accords despite the moral stigma and risks that deriheru (delivery sex work, the prevalent form today) entails.

Kathleen Millar makes a similar argument about catadores who, when embarking upon the risk-laden, morally stigmatized job of garbage picking in Brazil, do so for the better pay and flexibility the work affords them.Footnote ¹ With lives already precarious, it is less the job (of garbage picking) that is precarious than a life made somewhat less so by the job. So, too, are sex workers savvy about the limitations they face as women in the wider political economy of Japan. And, for those whom Koch features in the book, their path into and through sex work is done with considerable agency, sometimes aspiration, and often pride—in the “healing” work they are doing for the needy men they serve. This is also why, as Koch so carefully discussed in the two final chapters of the book (chapter 5, “Victims All” and chapter 6, “Risk and Rights”), few of the sex workers she spoke with aligned with anti-trafficking campaigns, not seeing themselves as victims of exploitation. This meant, as well, that virtually none favored criminalization of sex work. These women do not seek to be saved, unless that would mean de-gendering the entire workforce in Japan so that they could be amply compensated and employed somewhere besides in a job entailing sex.

Healing Labor is an analytically crisp book, based in relevant scholarship and energized by ethnographic storytelling that is beautifully done. It is very readerly and would work well in any number of classes, both undergraduate and graduate, on gender, sexuality, sex work, labor, affective labor, Japan, and/or global Asia. In offering one criticism, though, there is something that remains missing or problematic in Koch's overarching thesis: of sex work that is “productive” for the economy (and for sex workers’ own sense of legitimacy and self-respect) in the “healing” it performs for men wounded by the precaritization of life/labor in Japan today.

Does not the very sense of unease, and “imperiled masculinity” that is served by the affective labor of female sex workers, indicate that something is coming undone? And do the sex workers, so savvy about their second-class status in the larger political economy, really believe in the narrative of the social good their work does to “heal” men (as the reality they face is to engage in sex increasingly unprotected by condoms or labor laws)? Certainly, the gendering of the economy skews toward men and continues to disadvantage women: what, according to Koch's analysis, is the primary motivation for sex workers to enter what they perceive as just a temporary, ordinary, job to make better money? But, on both ends, things would seem to be messier and more complex—and I am left with the desire to see all of this pushed a bit further. The spunkiness of the sex workers whom Koch has so beautifully brought to the page begs for one more step here.