Back in high school I used to frequent a site called “Huanhuan Wenyuan”—basically the text-only version of a porn site, with dirty stories updated on the regular. That site kept going until I graduated college, then it vanished. Never came back. There were some genuinely good pieces on there, well-written enough to get your imagination going. The one I remember most was about a female teacher who promised her class that if the slackers all ranked near the top of the grade, she’d let them have their way with her. The writing was actually pretty interesting—the teacher goes through all these psychological hurdles, and when faced with the principal’s coercion she ends up choosing to give herself to the students instead. The ending was a bit unexpected, almost had a Happy Ending vibe. Anyway, I’m getting off track. But some formulas really do deliver results you wouldn’t expect—like this game, PacoMane: Watashi, Kyou kara Meimon Yakyuubu no Seishori Gakari ni Narimasu… (パコマネ わたし、今日から名門野球部の性処理係になります…).

Goddammit, ever since I started playing eroge I’ve learned a bunch of words that never showed up in any textbook. Stuff like yarichin, yariman, and then a while back I ran into yarisā. I’m sitting there wondering what the hell a yarisā even is, and of course I had to look it up, and of course that cost me an entire night of my youth. Everyone knows (don’t even say you don’t, I won’t believe you) that yariman is the word for a slut, and yarichin is the male version (hell, I don’t know what the good Chinese equivalent is, you can’t exactly call it “black foreskin”), so by analogy, yarisā is a sā of dare demo yareru, where sā is, of course, sākuru—circle in English—which in Japanese katakana means a “club” or “circle.” So put it together and a yarisā is a circle where anyone can get laid, or to spell it out plainly, a “hookup orgy club.” And while I was looking up yarisā, I found a couple of explanatory posts on Quora. That’s when I learned this word has way more going on under the hood than I thought. Quora: Some scandals involving Japanese university students Quora: Why do Japanese tennis clubs have such a bad reputation?

In high school I heard a thing: in the class next to ours, there was a girl who would have sex with people for money. “See, that’s her.” My deskmate pointed at the back of a girl from the next class and told me she was the subject of the “school secret” he’d described to me before. Honestly, I saw her face later. Not pretty, thick lips, but skinny, pale, a ponytail, always smiling. My biggest takeaway was: I can’t believe she’d do something like that.