Rurutan is an adult influencer with about 1.3 million followers. In a recent magazine conversation with author Akira Tachibana, she laid out how she got there — and it starts in a darker place than the usual “I wanted extra cash” story.
She was a law student whose mental health had collapsed. She decided there was no point in living, so her plan was to repay the 20 million yen her parents had spent on her up to that point, then end it. The fastest way she could think of to raise that kind of money was answering a recruitment ad for a delivery health service in Shimbashi.
She says she first understood that her body had market value much earlier. In middle school, on a train with club teammates, a man across from them started masturbating while staring at the girls. She still remembers the detail of his red jersey. Around the same time, male classmates suddenly fixated on her chest. Sex and appearance stopped being abstract. They had a price.
At first the work felt like a twisted kind of therapy. She wanted to be wanted. Clients requesting her again and again scratched that itch and, she says, gradually dulled the urge to die.
Then COVID hit and she moved to a parlor in Kabukicho. The mindset flipped. Affection stopped being the point. It became a business.
She watched other women stacking street work, sugar daddies, and parlor shifts and treated the whole thing like a market with a hard expiration date. Her move was the opposite of the usual “bleed the customer dry in a few expensive sessions” approach. She slowed things down on purpose — keep them coming back, extract money over a long stretch instead of one blowout. The interviewer compared it to a Las Vegas casino that would rather have a regular for decades than bankrupt someone in a single night.
Social media was the multiplier. She pointed existing parlor clients toward her X account. Their engagement fed the algorithm, her follower count jumped past 10,000, and that gave her leverage to negotiate a better cut from the parlor.
These days she talks about it as “eros capital” — treating sexual attractiveness as an economic asset — and calls herself a desire marketer. She also says she doesn’t particularly want to spend the money. She was the kind of student who loved ranking high on tests. University changed the scoring system. The sex industry gave her a number that felt unambiguous: you worked, you earned. She didn’t need 100 million yen. She wanted to prove she could make it.
That’s the version she told. Suicidal law student to high-earning Kabukicho worker to influencer with a seven-figure following, using the same drive that used to show up on report cards. Whether you read it as survival, calculation, or both, it’s a long way from the original plan.