For the past six years, 47-year-old single mother Kasumi Endo has lived a double life.
On weekdays, she works all day as a temp-staff office worker to raise her teenage daughter. But with wages hardly sufficient to keep the household afloat, Endo (not her real name) takes a surreptitious trip to Tokyo's downtown Ikebukuro district on weekends to earn extra money.
As she climbs the stairs to exit JR Ikebukuro Station, she gradually switches her normal self off and wills herself to accept that she is now someone else: a professional working in Japan's fuzoku sex industry.