clients, another sex worker who is a female dominant and who Ai clearly admires. Throughout the movie this person is the only person with whom Ai has a free open conversation. This woman delivers a monologue which defines her view of the sex trade as empowering and which is a sentinel defining concept to place the movie itself in a social context. This speech comes at a time when Ai appears to be having difficulties accepting her role as an escort and Ai is shown listening with rapt attention. Ai confides to this client that she has unrequited love for the gallery artist and Ai's client tells her that she must live life to the fullest otherwise she will be filled with regrets. She tells Ai that she must confront this part of her life then she can move forward as her future will be hers. At the beginning of the movie we are introduced to Ai's quest to find herself and her direction, She visits a fortune-teller, played by artist Yayoi Kusama, who advises her to find a "pink stone", and then fashion it into a ring. The fortune teller also advises Ai to put a telephone directory under her television and to avoid a gallery in the east. Ai's view of the ring is important enough that when she later loses the ring she risks her life to recover it. Throughout the movie Ai looks at a photo of what appears to be her as a child with her mother and which in context represents innocence before life became complicated. Ai appears to refer to it to ground herself perhaps pondering how the happy child has transformed in to what she has become. Taking the advice of her female client, and an unidentified drug which her client gave her to provide her with the courage of lions, she becomes dangerously inebriated and fails in an attempt to meet her ex lover, She is rescued from the police by one of the artist's neighbors who is said to have once been a great singer but is now crazy. This woman met Ai only a few minutes earlier and told her that she used to be friends with the Gallery artist but it is over and that she considers Ai to be her "best friend". Ai who is now sitting dirty and battered, looks at the photo of herself and