All You Need Is Morbid

Love for Rent

*

When we returned from our first day’s adventure, Terri sat in her kitchen drinking sake.  “What happened?” we asked.  “Did you miss your flight?”

Worse.  Immigration told her they wouldn’t prosecute her for the illegal stay, if she left the country.  Once she left Japan, however, she would not be allowed back in for six months or more.  Rather than abandon her business, her apartment, and all her belongings, she let her flight leave for Texas without her.  She planned to start officially protesting her case in the morning.

We immediately offered to find somewhere else to stay while she straightened out her legal status.  It would have blown our budget for the trip (the first night’s stay in the cheapest hotel we could find in Tokyo cost nearly $100), but we could hardly impose on her while she had so much other stress in her life.

Bless Terri.  She wouldn’t hear of us leaving.  She was grateful for American friends and English speakers to comfort her.  Besides, she expected to get everything straightened out in time to make the last days of SXSW.

*

Of course, things didn’t work out as planned.  As Terri’s fight to be allowed back into Japan dragged on, Mason and I got a truer picture of how Japanese exist together.  Terri’s apartment was spacious by Tokyo standards:  one room with a tatami floor served as Terri’s bedroom; a “Western” room with a hardwood floor and a full-size bed, where Mason and I slept since her roommate was out of town; and the kitchen, which housed Terri’s computers, fax, etc.  When the three of us sat in the kitchen, we formed a straight line along the counter.  Luckily, thanks to Japanese sanitary preferences, the shower and the toilet stood at opposite ends of the apartment.

Mason and I had looked forward to a lot of private time in our borrowed apartment.  After Terri’s generous gesture of allowing us to stay, we could hardly abuse her hospitality by getting joyfully amorous.  Mason and I found ourselves in a truly Japanese predicament, so we turned to the Japanese solution.

We found almost too many love hotels to choose from.  Most looked very bland from the outside.  Gaku, a Japanese friend, explained later that newer love hotels had stopped trying to look like pachinko parlors and wanted to seem classy.  In consequence, we didn’t see Las Vegas sprays of neon, anime nymphets in schoolgirl uniforms, or sleazy men in windbreakers trying to entice us into their hotels.

Most of the hotels didn’t even advertise their rooms right on the street, which meant that we had to go into the lobby to choose.  We ducked into one place done up like a traditional Japanese ryokan, complete with Buddhist rock garden and shoji screens over the windows, but all the photographs on the light board inside the door were dark.  That meant someone was using all the rooms.  For the sake of privacy, the hotels had no lobby in which to wait for the room you wanted to become free.

Another hotel offered rooms with black light projections on their ceilings and walls.  Unfortunately, when we went inside to inquire, both the room with the stars and planets and the room with the undersea creatures were occupied.  We wandered out to try our luck elsewhere.

The Hotel Passion was full, but beside it stood the Hotel Haines.  Both names were spelled out in Western characters.  We returned home before we made sense of the multilingual pun of the second name.  “Hai” is Japanese for yes, pronounced like “high.”  Rather than the Hotel “Hanes,” we’d chosen the Hotel Highness.

The linoleum-tiled lobby sported a koi aquarium.  A mechanical bird chirped to let the proprietress know we’d stepped inside.  Rooms illuminated on the Haines’ light board were available for a “rest.”  The “rest” option allows affectionate couples to purchase some privacy.  The length of the “rest” varies over the course of the day from as short as an hour to as long as three.  After business hours, around 11 p.m., rooms become available for a “stay,” which allows guests to spend the night, provided they vacate before the “rest” rates kick in again.  Many guidebooks, including Lonely Planet, recommend love hotels as inexpensive alternatives to legitimate hotels.

I pushed the button beneath the room with a rainbow mural.  The lengthy search had impaired my critical judgment.  I felt ready to “rest” already.

A grandmotherly lady called “konnichiwa” to us from behind a screened window.  We never saw more of her than her hands.  Once Mason paid her 3800 yen (about $40), she directed us up the stairs.  They had the loudest red carpet with the brassiest gold figures I’ve ever seen.  It felt climbing the steps of a whorehouse.

A chime rang over our heads, warning other patrons that someone wandered the hallway.  You wouldn’t want to step out of a room with your girlfriend and bump into your wife.

The nondescript door of the rainbow room opened into a tiny alcove for removing our shoes.  A cupboard with four hangers waited for overcoats and suit jackets.  Two pairs of cheap plastic slippers stood by for guests to borrow before walking on the gray linoleum floor.

The chief distinctive feature of the room was the mural beside the bed.  In the pastoral scene, people in old-fashioned clothes strolled among green hills.  The sun trailed the arc of a rainbow behind it.  Not exactly the romantic setting for which I’d hoped.

Built into an alcove, the bed had a fitted sheet, two barley-filled pillows, and a red comforter with a white cotton slipcover that would be easy to wash.  The headboard held two “New Rainbow” condoms in cellophane.  The twelve-channel radio played Eric Clapton and a J-Pop girl group singing “Love me the way I am” in English.

A little TV advertised a huge selection of porn channels.  A cabinet held a selection of videos at 300 yen for thirty minutes.

Other amenities included a hot plate and kettle with free tea and coffee and a coin-operated refrigerator full of big bottles of beer, cola, oolong tea, Sunkist, and ramen.

Large enough to hold several of our friends, the bathroom had been tiled in sea foam green with accents of fruit:  purple grapes, an opened pomegranate.  The Western-sized tub yawned deep like a Japanese bath:  built for two, I guess.  Beside it stood a plastic stool and bucket for washing yourself before you got into the tub.  The floor looked slightly wet when I stepped inside.  The maid must have just finished mopping.  It seemed that business had been good this morning.

Beside the shower stood large pump bottles of shampoo and body wash.  A vacuum-packed sponge said:  “The Sponge for the body shampoo.  It’s a still life watar color.  Of a now late afternoon.  As the sun shines through the curtained lace.  And shadows wash the room.”

Despite the typos, the poetry haunted me until we returned to the States.  One day I heard Simon and Garfunkel on the radio and finally identified the phrase from “The Dangling Conversation.”

The comb implored, “Seasons change with the scenery.  Weaving time in a tapestry.  Won’t you stop and remember me.  At any convenient time?”  That’s from Simon and Garfunkel’s “A Hazy Shade of Winter” on the Bookends album.

I got carried away by the poetry on the hygiene products.  The shower cap said, “I can take to the skies.  I can soar like a bird.  With his heart full of song.  Won’t you color my eyes.  I’ve been waiting so long.”  While I expected that would also be a Simon and Garfunkel lyric, it comes from Billy Joel’s “You Can Make Me Free.”  The soap quoted his “Through the Long Night”:  “And it’s so late.  But I’ll wait.  Through the long night with you.  With you.”  The “disinfected” plastic cup protested, “Maybe I’ve been hoping too hard.  But I’ve gone this far.  And it’s more than I hoped for,” from Billy Joel’s “The Longest Time.”

Reeling from the wooing of simple bathroom amenities, I returned to the bedroom to discover a “Campus” notebook with a thin cardboard cover.  It served as a guest register, recording people’s experiences in the room.  Several sketches adorned its pages:  two wide-eyed children with their heads tilted together surrounded by hearts, a skinny Japanese girl with a swelling belly, a man with a phallus the size of a baseball bat and a long fat nose like a salami. (The Japanese gesture for braggart is to mime a long nose.) Looking at the kanji, Mason read one report that, “This ho is crazy.”

So how was our Hotel Haines experience?  Thank you for asking.  The Haines was not the last love hotel we patronized during our week in Tokyo.  I came home thinking what a shame it is that U.S. cities don’t offer them.

***

“Love for Rent" was originally published on Trip Lit in October 2002 -- for my birthday.