Sounds of giggling and squealing are leaking through the hall as the couple next door play around with the vibrating, coin-operated bed. I’m sitting in my room at the Hotel 69 doing homework, automatically making me the biggest loser in the building. It doesn’t matter that everyone else in the building is porking an aging hooker, it still has to be more fun than memorizing characters from a textbook by the dim lamplight. The laughing next door has stopped and has been replaced with a rhythmic creaking-I reach for my headphones and turn the volume up.
It’s my last night in the Kansai Area (of Japan and I’m by myself at a love hotel. I came to this part of the island to visit my brother who’s briefly stopping in Japan as the final stop of a semester-long program spent taking classes on a boat, traveling around the world. Too lazy to search for youth hostels in the area, we chose to stay at love hotels since they’re cheap and easy (to find). The plan was to leave my brother back at his ship on the last night and then return to Tokyo, but since I missed the last train back, I found myself making another stopover at another shady love hotel.
Love hotels are a cheap place to spend the night if you’re traveling, or unfortunate enough to miss the last subway home, and offer a number of accommodating packages from the hourly (for the premature ejaculators) to the all-night specials for the marathoners. Usually fairly conspicuous, they tend to be clumped together in a section slightly removed from the bar/nightclub scene in most major Japanese cities. The names range from the suggestive (Hotel 69, Hotel Sexus) to the nondescript (Hotel Alten) to the downright bizarre (Hotel Christmas, complete with two-story plastic Santa, Christmas trees and lights strung out front). Overall, love hotels are the perfect place to cheat on your wife, stay for cheap on a student budget, or just spend some quality time in a room that’s guaranteed to have an antique karaoke machine, condom dispenser and free porn on tv.
Luckily, by the time I’m ready to go to bed both the vibrating bed and couple next door are through, leaving me with just my thoughts and free porn. Laying in bed, I stare at the flashing neon lights spilling into the room and try not to think about how many people have had sex in the same spot I’m lying in now. Instead, I close my eyes and relive the love hotel odyssey my brother and I had just plunged through.
The first night’s hotel, the Hotel Alten, was fairly unimpressive, aside from the bed large enough for four people and the porn-only flat-screen tv built into the wall over the bathtub. The second night we stayed at the appropriately named Hotel Sexus, which tried hard to sell itself as an upscale establishment with classical music playing softly, plushly carpeted hallways and discount-art paintings and sculptures adorning the landings on each floor. This illusion lasts only until you get in the actual rooms, where even the murky lighting isn’t dim enough to hide the grimy, faded walls, threadbare brown carpet and large, sunken bed. It doesn’t help that just about everything, from the robes and slippers to disposable toiletries, even the Kleenex boxes and ashtray, are emblazoned with the Hotel Sexus logo. I go to check in with my brother’s girlfriend-for-the-duration-of-the-trip (since it would be less conspicuous than checking in with him), figuring we can always just sneak him in later.
“Oh, wow,” says my brother’s girlfriend, noting the robes as we drop off our bags in the room, “I’m definitely stealing one of these.”
I protest weakly on the grounds that I paid with a credit card and don’t want to get billed for it, all the while eyeing some of the other fabulous Hotel Sexus apparel that may or may not end up in my bag before checkout time. We dump our backpacks in the least filthy looking spot we can find and head out.
When we return to the Hotel Sexus after a night of carousing in downtown Kyoto, I stand in front of the tiny receptionist window next to my brother’s girlfriend in order to block the view into the lobby as my brother walks up the stairs.
“There’s just two of you, right?” asks the rat-like man behind the counter suspiciously as he hands us the key.
“Uh-huh, just two of us,” I say, holding up two fingers through the grill for emphasis and, apparently, because I’m a moron. Its only when I turn around to go upstairs that I notice the cameras trained at the stairs and into the lobby. Shit. By the time we open the door the phone’s already ringing.
“Um, excuse me, sir, but there are three of you.”
“Three? Oh, right, three, you mean my friend, he’s just going to be here for a few minutes.”
“Well he has to leave in five minutes or you need to pay an extra 3,000 yen penalty if he stays the night.”
“Right, I’ll be down in a minute.”
I got back to the room a few minutes later pissed not only because I lost another 30 bones (U.S.) to the Hotel Sexus, but also because our checkout time was moved up by an hour (I reason it’s because having three people usually entails more clean-up time afterwards).
“Ok, grab as much Hotel Sexus stuff as you can fit in your bag, we’ll make back the extra fee that way,” I said.
Scott Matthews is a junior in the College and an associate editor of The Georgetown Voice. Ask him about the hand-job bars.
