"I couldn't sell any of my stories," writes Yoko, a 25-year old freelance writer based in Tokyo. "Naturally to keep the pot boiling I wound up taking on the worst types of assignments. The editors were always asking me to go out and do outrageous things, and report on the experience.

"Like the time they told me to hang around a public toilet, pull up my skirt and pee standing up, next to a man at the urinal, just to see how he would react. Or to go into a tent city and offer homeless men free hand jobs."

Uh oh, says Jitsuwa Taiho (May), we think we see what's coming. After all, the theme of this four-part article is women working in the "Ero Industry." In addition to the story of Yoko, the fearless female reporter, they include the titillating tale of a female photographer who was seduced by one of the nudes she shot, who happened to be a lesbian. Then there was one about a female editor who returned to her office after work and walked in to catch a male colleague masturbating at his desk (and most considerately helped him out with his "problem"). And finally there's the story of a female cartoonist who, while sketching a couple posing for a bed scene wound up joining them in a frisky threesome.

But surely Yoko's tale is the most compelling. Merely wishing to write stories to keep body and soul together, she wound up getting assigned to put that 25-year-old body on the flesh market.

This time, Mr. Nasty Editor-san assigned her to go underground and report on what it was like to work for a "delivery health" outcall sex service.

"The service is completely legal, and of course 'honban' (sexual intercourse) with the customer is prohibited, so all I had to do was give the customers hand jobs and so on," she writes. "But still, on the first day of work I was really nervous. They dropped me off in front of a love hotel. I went into the room and waited, alone, for him to arrive, thinking how I would feel if he rejected me and requested the service for a 'cheinji' (i.e., to send a different girl)."

The procedure for a deri-heru "session" generally involves disrobing and showering together, followed by a sensual massage and an oral sex session in bed. But this customer made a special request to Yoko.

"Let me go down on you."

Since it required no additional work on her part, she consented.

"He was pretty good at it," she relates. "My boyfriend does me sometimes, but this guy was a virtuoso and he really got me going. But then just when I felt I was going to lose it, he stopped."

"Eh? What's the matter?" I asked him.

"Oh, okay then, I'll do it for a little while longer," he said, and returned to his tonguing.

"At this point, I really started feeling the urge, like I'd never felt before. So I climbed on top of him and stuck him inside me, and began grinding my hips like crazy."

Then came an unexpected development.

"Number one hundred!" he suddenly shouts, jubilantly.

"What? One hundred what?" I ask.

"You're the hundredth deri-heru girl with whom I've succeeded in going all the way!" he tells me, with a huge grin. "And never even once, he says, did he have to request permission to stick it in. The girls all wanted it.

"While he's telling me this I'm still straddling him, and feeling pretty good, so I start grinding my hips again, and make it all the way to the finish line," she writes. "It was great."

Unfortunately, Yoko's experience was illegal, which meant she couldn't write about it.

"I didn't want the shop to get in trouble, so I didn't dare write that I'd had intercourse with the customer," she explains to Jitsuwa Taiho. "So when I handed in my watered-down story to the editor, he looked it over and sneered, 'What a piece of trash!'

"Anyway, he rejected the story but I still had the income from the hooking job. And the whole experience of being 'Miss 100' was incredible.

"The only problem now is, when my boyfriend goes down on me, I'm not satisfied any more," she sighs. (By Masuo Kamiyama, contributing writer)