Hokkaido Highway Blues

common and the most fun. Everything is automated. When you walk in, an electronic voice greets you and guides you to a display panel of illuminated photographs. These are the pictures and prices of the different rooms available, from the Leather Bondage Den to the Little Bo Peep Sheep Room. Rooms that are not occupied are lit up. You pick your temporary suite of passion, press the button below it, and then go to your love nest. It will be easy to spot; a light above the door will be flashing.
    The Park ‘n’ Ride Hotels are the easiest ones for foreigners to slip into unnoticed, but the Secret Hideouts are the most entertaining. The hotel I approached was of the Secret Hideout style. I staggered in, punched the cheapest room I could find on the display panel, and made my way to the elevator. The room was a crushed-velvet, purple-wallpaper affair with a round bed—which can be maddening when you’re drunk—and polyester sheets that were meant to suggest silk. A single condom was laid out on the pillow, like a mint. I looked up. Sure enough, a mirrored ceiling. Just what I need to see while I sleep: me, suspended above the bed like a Macy’s Parade balloon.
    The phone rang, and I mumbled “overnight” when she asked me what my plans were. In this hotel you didn’t pay by secret door but by pneumatic tube. A whoosh of air and a plastic canister came sliding down. I stumbled over and took the canister out, put in my money, pressed a green button, and— whoooosh! —off it went. A few moments later, it came back down the tube with some change and a souvenir key chain.
    I sprawled out across the bed, my head still spinning in a fog of alcohol. When I opened my eyes I found myself face to face with a scruffy, ashenfaced man in a crumpled shirt and a sweaty face. Damn these mirrored ceilings. I rolled over like a walrus looking for a place to die, and found, beside the bed, a notebook and a pen. These notebooks are the most bizarre aspect of staying in a Love Hotel. Each page has a cartoon Kama Sutra of sexual positions and space for messages. Couples circle the sex positions they tried and leave notes to the people who follow. I flipped through this one and noted that the most recent entry was made that very day. The rooms are spotlessly clean and antiseptic, but figuratively speaking—the sheets were still warm. These room journal notebooks are meant to be titillating and it is, I suppose, but I find the entire ritual a bit odd. Erotic notes to strangers. Clinical, cartoon descriptions of what you have just done to each other. I don’t get it. Whenever I’m in a Love Hotel, I usually write something in the room journal in Japanese-English, just to shake things up, something along the lines of Many times enjoy American-style happy sex play! Tonight, still reeling and feeling queasy, I wrote nothing.
    A catalog of sexual aids and vibrating love toys, available from the front desk, was discreetly tucked in behind the headboard. The catalog was titled, in elegantly written English, Playing Goods for Lovetime. But even this could not hold my interest. I crawled over to the bed’s side panel and tried to turn off the lights, but managed instead to flood the room with romantic music and a swirling disco-ball éffect that didn’t do my vertigo any good whatsoever.
    I slumped back feeling very morose. No, there wasn’t an Akita bijin beside me drinking champagne and laughing at my ready wit. No, there was no one here to enjoy my American-style happy sex play. I was in a Love Hotel. Alone. Surely my lowest point ever.
    Then, just as I drifted into something approximating sleep, I realized that all my clothes and belongings were still in a room at the Hotel Hawaii, which was costing me money. Big money. Over twenty thousand yen. Having set out to save money, I was now spending over two hundred fifty dollars for accommodation: one for me and one for my baggage.
    Personally, I blame the pizza toast.
     

13
     
    OH LORDY.
    I woke up with a hellish hangover and a headache of apocalyptic proportions. With a painful gait, I limped out of the Love Hotel, into the pallid streets of an Akita morning. Japanese cities by day—and especially the nightlife zones—are a lot like waking up beside someone you picked up at a bar: a bit hard to escape, or even face, in the harsh glare of morning. So it was with Akita. It proved a difficult city to leave. I walked for over an hour, past stale façades and concrete buildings, along