Fantasy Girlfriend Diary | If Kaho Hanamori Were Your Relaxation Therapist

In the stream of people coming through the ticket gate, there she was, a camera hanging from her neck.

She stopped just past the gate and looked up at the ceiling first. Then she turned around and photographed the gate she’d just come through. The shutter sound was half swallowed by a bus idling in the roundabout.

“The roof here is wood, huh.”

That came before any greeting. It was a station where only local trains stopped, with a single ticket gate. The wooden beams bore mottled traces of repainting. I’d used this station for school and work for almost twenty years and had never once looked up at it.

Her birthday had been at the end of last month. I couldn’t get the day off, and the following week she worked seven days straight, so our makeup plans fell through twice. Today was the third try, and it finally worked out. She was the one who chose where to go. She’d said for a while that she wanted to get off at a station she’d never been to. So I offered my hometown, and she went quiet for about five seconds before saying, let’s go.

Two taxis sat in the roundabout, both drivers with newspapers open. On the bus stop timetable, only the Sunday column was short. She photographed that too.

When we started walking side by side, her head came to just below my shoulder. Her hair was tied back, higher than usual. The back of her neck showed. As we passed close together, I caught a citrus smell. She’d told me early in our relationship — it was the oil she used at work. Even on her days off, she said, it never quite washed out because she brought her work clothes home to launder.

“Hungry?”

“Not yet. I want to walk.”

She reset her grip on the camera strap and crossed the crosswalk in front of the station ahead of me.

---

The shopping street had no arcade roof, running straight for about two hundred meters. It was midmorning on a Sunday; fewer than half the shops were open.

She stopped in front of a dried-goods shop. A plastic basket was piled high with dried sardines, the price tag handwritten in marker, the paper curled and sun-bleached. She crouched down and photographed it. She bent her knees, lowered her hips, and sank down with her upper body still straight. Her back didn’t round. When she stood back up, she rose on her legs alone, without touching a hand to the ground.

“This one’s fine to shoot, right?”

“Probably nobody minds.”

“Okay, then I’m shooting everything.”

There was no white showing on her thumbnails at all. When her fingertip turned the camera dial, it made contact with the pad, not the nail. About a month into dating, she’d told me it was because you couldn’t touch a person’s body if your nails were too long. Not cut painfully short — the rule was just to keep them trimmed to a length that left no white edge.

On the shutter of a closed bookstore, a notice dated five years ago was still taped up. Under the eaves of a flower shop, buckets of chrysanthemums stood in a row, the smell of water heavy in the air. No one was out front; inside the glass case in back, bundles of altar flowers all faced the same way. She photographed the sign reflected in the bucket water, then didn’t go inside the shop. When we passed under a low-hanging shop curtain, I ducked my head, but she just walked on through.

Three doors down, in front of a produce stand, she suddenly stopped. Ahead, in the direction she was looking, an old man was pushing a shopping cart.

“That man’s favoring his right knee.”

She said it quietly. The old man’s stride was uneven, left to right; only when he stepped with his right foot did his shoulder come forward, just partway. Only once she’d said it could I see it too. She watched for about three seconds, then lowered the camera. The decision not to photograph this one showed in that motion.

Then she turned to me and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Yours is uneven too. The left side’s raised.”

Not her thumb — she pressed with her whole palm. It felt less like being pushed than like something settling its weight on me. Her weight dropped fully onto my shoulder once, then lifted off immediately.

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“I’m not trying to make it hurt. This is a spot you’re not supposed to knead.”

She took her hand away and started walking again. She didn’t explain what wasn’t supposed to happen there.

---

We had lunch at a Chinese restaurant. A place called Kouraku — it had been there since I was in elementary school.

Sliding the door open, the smell of oil and soy sauce rushed out at us, the TV loud. Behind the counter, the old man who ran the place looked up.

“Oh. Long time.”

“Hey.”

That was all I said, and the old man’s eyes moved past me. She stepped forward and bowed her head.

“Nice to meet you. Thanks for having us.”

The casual speech from a moment ago had vanished in a single breath. Even the pitch of her voice had dropped a little. I realized later — it was the voice she used on work calls.

We sat facing each other at a table for four. She opened the menu with both hands and tilted it toward me.

“Can I order this?”

Her finger was pointing at the yakisoba. Her voice was already back to normal. The voice for the old man, and the voice for me. Two different voices from the same person inside of a minute, and there was no moment I could point to where one switched to the other.

Handwritten menu boards lined the wall, a few of them with the prices covered by a fresh strip of paper pasted on top. The TV was loud, the weather report announcing rain for tomorrow.

The yakisoba, gyoza, and rice arrived. The steam, the instant the plates touched the table, stirred her bangs slightly. She reached to split the food onto small plates, realized there were no serving chopsticks, and dished it out with her own chopsticks in two passes. The noodles were thick; lifting them, the toppings didn’t come along. She put too much chili oil on the gyoza and choked on the first bite. She drank some water, laughed through a cough, and then reached for another piece.

“Did you come here a lot?”

“Since around fourth grade. If I got a hundred on a test, I’d get brought here.”

“Whoa. A hundred gets you Chinese food — that’s a really nice family.”

She finished all of her own gyoza, then pointed at the last piece on my plate. Before I could say do you want it, she’d already taken it.

The old man came out from the kitchen and rolled his shoulder while wiping down the next table. He tilted his head side to side. The sound of a joint popping carried across the counter.

“Old man, has that been going on for a while?”

She turned and said it. She called him old man. Twenty minutes after meeting him, the distance in her had already closed that far.

“Ten years now. Hurts even lying down.”

She set down her chopsticks, stood, and moved around behind the old man’s chair. Not without asking — she said just the one line, is it okay, then placed her fingers at the base of his neck.

“This is a spot you’re not supposed to press.”

“Is that right.”

“People whose pain is here — the cause is usually the inside of the shoulder blade. Pressing it gives you a moment of relief, so everyone presses it anyway.”

Her hand had moved to the upper part of the old man’s back. She didn’t use her thumb. She laid her palm flat and let her weight settle onto it, little by little. Her heels lifted, then came back down. Even from across the room, I could see the old man’s shoulder drop.

It was about ten seconds. She took her hand away and wiped both palms on the hem of the hoodie she wore in place of an apron.

“Anything more than that, I’d need the shop for.”

“That works.”

“Heh.”

When we paid, the old man didn’t charge us for the gyoza.

---

“There’s a public bath here.”

When I said that as we left the restaurant, her reaction was the biggest of the day.

“Wait, hold on. Does it have a sauna?”

“It does, I think.”

“No way! Let’s go! Let’s go let’s go let’s go!”

Behind the shopping street there’s a public bath called Matsu-no-yu. One chimney stood up out of it, the landmark. As a kid I’d come here once a week with my father. I’d never heard of the building being renovated, and the curtain over the entrance was the same navy blue I remembered.

The attendant’s stand was wood, an electric fan set on top. The woman seated there brought out two rental towel sets. She reached for her wallet, then noticed I’d already paid, and said, then I’ll buy the milk.

“How many minutes in the sauna?”

“Don’t know. Have to go in and see.”

“Let’s be out in an hour.”

“Okaaay.”

We split left and right at the curtains. The women’s curtain swayed, and her back disappeared behind it. A basin clattered somewhere beyond.

The men’s side had three of us, counting me. The mural on the wall was Mount Fuji, the lower half peeling from the damp. The water was hot; sinking in to my shoulders, my soles went numb. The sauna was small enough to fill with five people, and an hourglass hung on the wall. Turned over, it took twelve minutes for the sand to run out.

I got out after thirty minutes. In the changing room, the fan swiveled back and forth, chilling my wet arms each time it passed. A rattan mat covered the floor and gave slightly underfoot. In the corner sat an analog scale, its needle off by two kilograms from the start. I stepped on and subtracted the difference.

At the bottle case, I bought two coffee milks. A bottle opener was nailed to the wall, an empty can set below it to catch the falling caps.

On the TV, a sumo rerun was playing. The woman at the attendant’s stand watched it, clapping her hands lightly.

Beyond the curtain, a basin set down on the floor, once. Then laughter. A short exchange followed, someone apparently talking with her, then it dissolved into the sound of the water.

She didn’t come out.

Forty minutes. Fifty. Condensation began to form on the milk bottles, and I put them back in the cooler once. The woman at the stand asked, your companion? When I answered, she likes saunas, she laughed and said, then she’ll be a while yet. Ours runs hot because it’s old, she added. The thermometer on the wall had never once pointed to a hundred degrees, but the regulars all came out saying it was hot, she said.

Seven minutes past the hour, the women’s curtain moved.

---

Her hair was down. The not-quite-dry ends clung to her shoulders, and her skin was flushed from her neck down to her collarbone. She’d left her hoodie unzipped, a towel in her right hand, her left pressing down bangs the dryer hadn’t managed to settle.

“So hot.”

That was all she said, the moment she sat on the bench.

I handed her the coffee milk. She put one hand on her hip, brought the bottle to her mouth, and drank it down to the halfway mark in one go. Her throat worked. When she finished, she let out a breath — haah.

“I ended up doing three sets.”

“You said an hour.”

“I did say that, but — the cold bath there is amazing. They said it’s drawn from a well.”

The thermometer read sixteen degrees, she said. Not too cold, a temperature you could stay in for a long time. Her only complaint was there was nowhere to catch the outside air, so she’d cracked the changing room window and pulled a chair up to it. The woman at the stand hadn’t said anything, apparently.

She was pressing the base of her right thumb with her left hand. Pressing, and slowly rotating it. She did the same thing on work nights too, in front of the TV. The bone at the base stuck out just slightly, and she pinched it between the opposite thumb and pressed.

“Does that always hurt?”

“It doesn’t hurt. It just gets stiff. If I don’t work it back out properly, I can’t put strength into it the next day.”

The citrus smell from when we’d passed each other earlier was gone. Only soap remained. Her clothes and bag had been sitting in the same place the whole time, and yet the smell alone had been swapped out.

“Are saunas really that good?”

“They are. That’s the one thing I can’t do anything about myself.”

You can’t work your own body, she’d said before. Wherever your hand can reach, the angle’s already wrong, just by the fact that it can reach.

Still holding the bottle, she stood and stopped in front of a massage chair in the corner of the changing room. The faux-leather seat was cracked, three ten-yen coins left on the armrest.

“Is this a hundred yen?”

“Probably always has been.”

She didn’t sit. She slid a hand inside the backrest, tracing the position of the mechanisms inside with her fingers, from top to bottom.

“The shoulder part’s set too high. If you’re short, this would hit your neck.”

She said that and pulled her hand out. I said, you could just try sitting in it, and she shot back, no, immediately. If someone’s going to work on me, I want it done by someone who actually knows what they’re doing, she said. She didn’t say the name of her own shop.

We returned the bottles, ducked through the curtain, and stepped outside — the air had turned cold. The sun was already low, the chimney’s shadow stretching all the way to the wall on the far side of the street.

---

Let’s go up the hill — that was me.

North of the station was a residential area, the slope steepening partway up. At the top stood a water tower. In middle school, club practice had made us run this hill back and forth more times than I could count. I didn’t mention that.

About halfway up, her breathing went ragged.

“Wait, there’s more?”

“Just a bit further.”

“I sweated everything out in the sauna.”

Even as she said it, she didn’t slow down. Didn’t stop, either. Her breath was ragged, but the movement of her legs stayed exactly the same. I thought, she’s probably like this at work too. I’d heard once that she’d book four ninety-minute sessions in a day and still press with the same pressure through the last ten minutes of the last client.

The water tower stood on four iron legs; looking up from below, streaks of rust ran vertically down its belly. A fence surrounded it — that was as close as anyone could get.

“Whoa, huge.”

She raised the camera just short of the fence, crouched, stood back up, and shot maybe thirty frames. The evening sun caught the tower’s edge, blowing it out white just there.

When she finished shooting, she turned the lens on me.

“Look this way.”

“Nah, it’s fine.”

“It’s not fine. Actually look this way.”

The way she said it was an order. Not her work voice, not the voice from before — something more forceful. I gave in and looked at the lens, and the shutter clicked three times.

“Three shots when I wasn’t even moving?”

“Because your face was different every time.”

She lowered the camera and circled around behind me. Before I could ask what she was doing, a hand landed on the middle of my back.

“This is locked up.”

It wasn’t her fingertips. It was the base of her palm, near the heel of her hand. Her arm extended, her weight settling in slowly. The sensation of being pressed passed clean through my back and out the front, and I stumbled half a step.

“Breathe out.”

I did as told, and the pressure went deeper. Her hand didn’t move. It just stayed there, sinking in time with my exhale. I could feel the spaces between my ribs opening.

After about thirty seconds, she took her hand away. Only the shape of her palm’s warmth remained on my back. Once she’d let go, I could feel the spot go suddenly light.

“That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“You could keep going, you know.”

“No.”

She opened her own palm and looked at it for a moment. Then, one finger at a time, she bent them back with her other hand. A joint popped, four times.

Then she came and stood beside me and put a hand on the fence. The evening sun passed through the tower’s legs, stretching our shadows long.

“At the shop, from here it’s a really long way still.”

“From here?”

“I don’t go all the way to the part that feels good — on purpose. When it’s about to get there, I stop, go somewhere else, then come back. It works better at the end that way.”

She hooked her fingers in the fence mesh and talked while looking at it.

“I couldn’t do it at first. When I could tell the other person was waiting, I’d end up getting impatient before they did.”

“And now?”

“Now, well —”

Right there she looked at me and smiled.

“Now, making them wait is the fun part.”

Her fingers stayed hooked in the fence mesh. Her short-nailed fingers moved from one hexagonal cell to the next. Without deciding where to put my own hand, I grabbed the same fence. There was a gap of about three fingers’ width between her hand and mine, and I didn’t close it any further. It ended up being the exact thing she’d just told me about, handed back to her.

Wind struck the tower’s legs, a low metallic sound. Her hair was dry by now, the loose ends turning to face the wind. I started to say something and, in the end, said nothing. She’d lifted the camera again, and started shooting not the water tower but the cluster of rooftops spreading out below the hill.

---

By the time we started down the hill, the streetlights were beginning to come on.

Going down is harder on the knees than going up, she said. So on the way down, you shorten your stride. In fact, she was taking half a step more than me with every stride. Walking beside someone who walks like that, my own stride shrank to match without my meaning it to.

Turning a corner partway down brought us onto a street lined with two-story houses. In front of the third one, where two bicycles stood beside the gate post, I slowed my pace a little. A light was on in the second-floor window. One of the bicycles was the one I’d ridden through high school, the saddle still set at the same height. In the pot on top of the gate post, succulents had overgrown, and a few had fallen to the ground and taken root there.

“Here?”

I hadn’t said anything, and she’d guessed right.

“How’d you know.”

“Your walking slowed down.”

She stopped in front of the house and looked at it in silence for a moment. Behind the curtain, a shadow of a person moved, then disappeared again. It was dinnertime. The low hum of a ventilation fan leaked out into the street, and the smell of grilling fish. She lifted the camera and photographed the second-floor window. The shutter sound rang out louder than I expected.

“Sorry, I shot it without asking.”

“It’s fine.”

“I’m not going in.”

“Not today.”

She didn’t answer that, and started walking. Two steps ahead, she reached her hand back toward me without turning around. When I took it, her palm was hard. There was a thickness on the pads of her fingers, as inconspicuous as the lack of white on her nails. Only the spots that took pressure every day at work had a different quality of skin.

That hand didn’t loosen once, the whole way to the station.

---

She stopped in front of the ticket gate and turned off the camera. The click of the lens cap going on was dry and short.

“I’ll send you the photos.”

“All of them?”

“Can’t do all of them. There’s four hundred.”

I said, you shot that many? and she folded her fingers as if to count, then gave up partway.

“Starting next week I’m on the late shift. Might not be able to call at night for a while.”

The late shift ran from one in the afternoon to eleven at night; by the time she clocked out, changed, and got home, it would be past midnight. Just one ninety-minute booking at the end, she said, and even that could slip by thirty minutes.

“Got it.”

“Then let’s do daytime.”

She decided just like that and pulled out her IC card. She tapped it through the gate, passed to the other side, then turned back. Two, then three people passed her by.

She took the camera out of her bag once more and pointed the lens at me. Behind her, the sound of a train’s doors closing rang out on the platform. Whether the shutter actually fired or not, I couldn’t hear from this distance.

Work Note

On the slope, keeping her hand at his back, she told him: “I’m not going to let you feel too good.” That line has a source.

“I get nervous when it’s my first time…” —— In one DEEP’S video, Kaho Hanamori played a newly hired therapist at a men’s massage parlor. The pitch: groin-area teasing work where her fingers barely make contact. Without touching, she takes her client to the edge. The marketing copy about a pleasure massage that strikes without giving a moment’s respite isn’t an exaggeration. Stopping itself becomes technique.

In the narrative I wrote about her—the moment she placed a finger at the base of an old man’s neck and said “You’re not supposed to press this spot,” then pulled her hand away. That sense of restraint, stretched out across 137 minutes, is what this work is. In one specific way—pushing the client into a corner through the sheer length of time she doesn’t touch—the girlfriend in the story and the girlfriend in this video are the same person.

The draw is how long she holds the line. At first she sets a boundary: “We don’t do that kind of thing.” He comes back anyway. It took three times before that boundary moved—that’s what the product copy says happened. Which means most of this video is time when nothing has occurred yet. There are plenty of projects that sell on teasing, but few that stretch so far on the sheer consistency of refusing. Watch the sample video to feel the massage space first, then dive into the main content, and the mindset of the person being turned down shifts substantially.

Note: Product information is displayed in Japanese.