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Hunting a Love Hotel after midnight on a Saturday night is a doomed venture. Most lovers have already found the finest places, and you are left with the pickings, peering at the most interesting rooms as their pictures are darkened on the push-button room menu lightboard from which you select your room. At the Hotel Manjo in Uguisudani, I could see some very lively rooms in those darkened photos and I made a note to return the next night.
So on Sunday, the lighboard was lit up behind a America West themed room, with wraparound mirrors, and a wall-sized poster of grazing horses. The room photo also boasted some sort of white wagon-cum-car bed apparatus promising some novel bedtimes.
Upon arrival in number 407, we discovered that the car was missing from under the bed, but the room itself was redeemed by the tall gold letters over the bed reading "Cowntry & Westarn." This filled my heart with some great joy for the entire stay.
There was a sex-toy vending machine, beverage vending fridge, TV and VCR vending setup (non-functional), next to a giant glass painting of a dour looking young native american lady. All this under large gold letters reading "Sheriff Office" which they managed to spell correctly, though Sheriff is a more rare and difficult word.
On the TV, there were three channels of porn, all of Japanese origin.
One channel was devoted to watching a woman in her underwear futzing about in her apartment, reading a magazine, composing short mail on her mobile phone, watching the TV, drinking tea from a plastic bottle. Occasionally she stroked herself, or adjusts her naked breasts. I left it on as though someone else is inhabiting the apartment next door and I can watch in a sort of companionable surveillance, as Ayako has already showered and bathed and headed to bed and I have stayed up to work at the tiny table with an even smaller wooden chair.
This room is even cheaper than last night at the Hotel Seeds, around 7100 yen (about 55 dollars these days), payable by credit card. More of the appliances are semi-functional or broken, and the bathroom is not so decorous. In the morning when I take my shower, the hot water disappears entirely. But the kitsch decor is utterly stimulating and I look forward to another night in a different room at the Hotel Manjo.
For example, room 308, perhaps doing to traditional Japan what room 407 did to the American west:
I'm told "Manjo," while written by this Hotel in Roman characters, if you render it in Japanese Kanji characters, it means good woman.
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