Hokkaido Highway Blues

my backpack. It’s on the lower level.”
    “No, it isn’t. It’s right here.” They slid it over.
    “Yes, but I need to get my other backpack. I’ll be right back.”
    Somehow I slithered free and disappeared down the stairs, dragging my pack behind me. I frantically looked for a place to hide. I found a corner behind a closed magazine stand and I squeezed in. Through the ferry windows I could see the docks of the mainland approaching, and I soon heard various voices calling out “Gaijin! Gaijin! We have to go. Gaijin, where are you?”
    The voices came and went from various distances, until one truck driver walked into the very room I was hiding in. I held my breath. There was only the throb and shudder of the ship’s engines. “Gaijin?” With a heart-skipping seizure, I realized that I was standing in front of a light and my shadow was cast far across the floor, beyond my hiding nook. Fortunately, the man was too drunk to notice. Seeing no one about, he continued the search on the next level. “Gaijin! Gaijin! Where are you?”
    They sounded genuinely worried, and I felt a small pang of guilt. Not enough to come out, you understand, but enough to make me feel sort of bad, especially after all the free beer.
    The ferry bumped up against the pier, and I watched from above as the convoy of granite trucks rolled off the dock. They drove slowly, backing up traffic, and I saw Zorba looking this way and that from the passenger window of the lead vehicle, still trying to spot me. The trucks rumbled clear of the ferry and turned toward Osaka. Only then did I make my exit.
    I was congratulating myself on my cunning when I realized, with a flood of all too familiar despair, that once again I was alone in the middle of the night, facing yet another dingy expanse of warehouses and empty dockside streets.
     

2
     
    CAPSULE HOTELS ARE a Japanese invention, and who else but the Japanese could have invented them? Instead of renting an entire room, you rent a small, space-age pod and crawl inside like an astronaut preparing to be frozen in suspended animation. Each unit has a control panel, a radio, an alarm clock, and even a television set. The rows of capsules/pods are arranged like storage bins, but the rest of the hotel is more spacious. There is a large, smoke-infested common room full of coughers, lots of vending machines, a coffee shop and a spacious Roman bath where you soak in luxury before crawling into your space pod for the night. In the West, our beds are big and our baths are small. In Japan, it is precisely the opposite.
    The clientele at your average capsule hotel is made up largely of riffraff, ruffians, college students, shady characters, late-night pachinko players and overworked salarymen who missed the last train home.
    Capsules cost half as much as regular hotels, they are open twenty-four hours a day, and no reservations are required, which makes them ideal for the independent traveler. The bad news? Many capsules don’t like to rent to foreigners. We make their other clients uncomfortable, we walk around in our shoes, we soap ourselves inside the bath, we rarely speak Japanese, we can’t understand how anything works, we keep pushing the red emergency button on the control panel, and the pajamas never fit us. The list of our transgressions is long.
    Which is why, when I caught a taxi to the Hawaii Capsule in Himeji City, I made a big show of taking off my shoes and putting on the plastic slippers laid out for guests. I wanted the man at the front desk to realize that, although I was a big clumsy barbarian, I knew enough not to go tracking dirt through the hotel. But before I got two steps toward him, he stopped me cold, holding out a hand in traffic-cop fashion. “Japanese,“ he said with a voice full of gruff. “Do you speak Japanese?”
    His name was Ogawa and he was trying to look stern, but it didn’t work. He was a square-faced, middle-aged man with his hair slicked straight back in a style that was appropriate for someone associated—however circumstantially—with the seedier side of life.
    “Yeah, I speak the lingo,” I said in what I hoped was an equally gruff Osaka accent. It worked. His face spread into a wide grin, his gruffness being the thinnest of charades, and he happily checked me in. He went over the various charges and options and the endless rules, and then in a whispered aside, he said, “There is an extra charge of five hundred yen, if you want the ‘special’