We’d checked in last night to the last place mom and I were going to live alone in, before being joined by Bua and dad, and Onkar, although he insisted on having his own accommodation booked separately ‘for convenience’ (he promised he’d hang out with us though).
At this point, we’d gotten used to living in all sorts of places — dingy dorms and pristine privates alike — so we didn’t bat an eye when the only remotely inexpensive option for these last few nights was (a) all the way in Odawara (where we’d stayed before with the family in our first few days here — it was an hour-ish away from Tokyo, but honestly, it takes almost that long just to get from one extreme side of Tokyo to the other, and we’d already been living in a faraway corner of the city, so anywhere else would’ve taken at least half as long. Basically, the travel didn’t bother us), and (b) very, very modest.
There was only one room pictured on Booking.com, and it was tiny, with a double bed (a first for the trip — we’d only seen bunks and futons so far), pretty dim lighting and not much else visible. The site listed a bunch of amenities, though. The rating was a questionable 6.2, which in another country would’ve been a red flag, but the Japanese are known for their brutal customer ratings, so we figured 6.2 would be fine — or at least, we’d make do.
We would’ve gone for a slightly better option if one existed, but Tokyo was expensive. (When I say expensive, I mean 2-3x the cost of this expensive.)
The room seemed liveable, but it definitely wouldn’t be our first choice to study in. Plus, it was quite a walk from the nearest train station. So, we decided to only make our way to the hotel once to sleep at night, rather than going to drop off our bags and then having to travel back.
First, we lingered at Yokohama Station after checking out from our previous place at 11 a.m. It was a beautiful, sunny day to see the bay area. We explored a huge mall, shared an ichigo-curimu-nutera (strawberry-cream-nutella) crêpe and sat in the rooftop garden just outside the pet area, watching people bring their fancy dogs in fancy strollers in and out. (Dogs are so tame here — we didn’t hear a single bark.)
Then, we made our way to Odawara in the late afternoon where we camped out at Café Veloce (a great study spot), staying there until it closed.
We arrived at the hotel around 9:30pm. Booking.com said check-in was open from 3pm to 12am.
The neighborhood seemed deserted — the hotel was the only thing lit up.
There were large signs displaying room prices on the outside walls, which was a first. Guesthouses don’t usually advertise that boldly, but we figured they just wanted people to know how inexpensive they were. At first, we didn’t even realize it was the hotel’s wall, because the sign came a little later. We didn’t think anything of it though.
Then we walked inside.
The entrance led to what looked like a parking lot.
There were garage-like rooms on either side of a passage, with curtains pulled over the entryways.
At first we thought these were the rooms, and we were shocked. Was a plastic curtain the only door our room was going to have? No, that couldn’t be.
I pulled out my phone to look for a check-in message from the hotel on Booking.com. Usually, properties send some kind of welcome instructions, but surprisingly, there was nothing from this one.
I hadn’t noticed earlier, and I just assumed there would be some communication waiting for me, if not an actual human at the hotel. Instead there was a floor map of sorts displayed in front of the entryway, labeling this whole corridor as part of the property.
There were iriguchi (entrance) symbols pointing to both ends of the corridor.
I hoped that one of these ends would house a reception desk, but the first was a dark dead end and the other one had 2 lights (which I mistook as doors), but they turned out to just be decorative lanterns.
There was one last option — a light coming from the one room that actually had a wooden door.
We’d knocked on it previously, to no avail. Desperate, we knocked again.
At this point, I started panicking.
Where had we come? How were we supposed to check in? Did we get the timings wrong? Where would we sleep tonight, if we weren’t able to get in?
It had been a good few minutes since we arrived, when finally an old lady came out from the door we’d knocked on a while ago.
I held up Google Translate.
‘We have a reservation. We'd like to check in.’
She went in and fetched a piece of paper with 3 names, the middle one being mine. She pointed to it, looking at me expectantly. I nodded. The other two must have checked in already.
She then pulled out Google Translate on her own phone, and began typing.
This was the beginning of a long string of questions, but the first one was the banger.
‘This is a love hotel, is that okay?’
Mom was quizzical. I felt doomed.
Had I just booked my mother and I into a… sex hotel? I was never going to hear the end of this.
It proceeded to get worse.
We learned things from the lady’s translations like the fact that we’d only be able to lock our room from the inside (there was no key), so our belongings would be unguarded when we were out, although ‘if the curtains on the garage are pulled closed, then no one will enter’ (sex hotel code, or something).
She then asked for our stay’s money, which caught me off guard once again. I thought I had already paid online. I told her that too, to which she responded that this is a local settlement and they don’t take money online.
Looking through my bank transfer history and then the property’s description on the booking site once again confirmed that I had not in fact paid yet, and was supposed to do so at the property.
I Google Translated one last thing to ask her (since it wasn’t final final yet and she was also looking at us to see if all the rules she’d just told us were acceptable terms for us) — could we see the room?
I actually asked if mom could see the room, because I would be fine with more or less anything but if being in a ‘love hotel’ wasn’t acceptable for mom, I’d understand.
In any case, I needed her to be happy with the place because, again, I wouldn’t hear the end of it if she wasn’t. Not just from her, but she’d tell everyone in the family. And this is not something I wanted to be the talk of the ton (or fam) for.
The lady agreed, and opened our room’s door.
Stairs.
Made sense.
We saw the garages so of course the residences would be upstairs.
Less convenient was the fact of how narrow and steep they were. Mom took a while to go and come back, and while she exclaimed that there were lots of stairs (I couldn’t see the extent of it from the entrance since they spiralled), she looked content. I asked her if the room was okay, and she didn’t hesitate to say yes. We agreed that we would stay.
We tried to pay, but the lady’s card machine wasn’t working. She said she’d come back for it later and gestured for us to go inside.
We’d exhausted ourselves with hauling our suitcases up and down multiple flights of stairs at the last station we’d got off at and didn’t have it in us to take them up right away, so we left them in the stairwell and went up.
After about a floor of stairs came the bathroom. There were towels in a basket outside it and it looked alright at a glance.
Then there were more stairs. I continued climbing, thinking about how getting our suitcases up these would be a nightmare.
And then came the actual room.
This was not the room in the booking site photos. This was…
Glorious.
Spacious? More than any other place we’d stayed in so far. Clean? Sparkling.
And those were just the basics. This was luxurious.
The double bed was huge — queen sized at least (could be king too, I don’t know my bed sizes that well). There was a sofa on one side, a bar table with bar stools on the other. Microwave, fridge. Another nook with a dressing table and a toilet nearby. A TV. And plenty of space to walk around, even if we had our suitcases sprawled open all the time. There was even a huge window that we could open to get daylight and fresh air in.
Sure, there were some untasteful things too — condom dispensing machines. Brochures with pictures of things it’s not proper to mention. A runner on the sheets with a heart printed, that I immediately tossed into a corner.
A panel of light switches that took us an hour to discover but once we found it and realized that it controlled the lights. (We’d been looking for light switches on the walls because we could see bulbs that were switched off but we couldn’t figure out how to turn them on. Upon entrance the lights were dimmed— the mood was set, you know?)
But barring these smaller, kinkier amenities, we were going to live in luxury.
I got the zoomies, quite literally.
I’d been relieved when the card machine didn’t work, because I thought it’d be our last chance to back out of this place. I planned to go upstairs and immediately look for any other place nearby that wouldn’t nearly bankrupt us that we could stay in for the next 3 nights.
I figured that we could still perhaps pay for one night and check out early if we found another option, but it was instantly evident that there would be no need.
I also thought to myself how petty it was to feel this happy over material comforts — just like how grumpy I’d gotten about the last place, where we’d lacked all of these things.
I don’t think of myself as someone who places too much value on luxuries, but the contrast between my moods in those two situations made me wonder if that was actually true. It wasn’t even about needing five-star treatment — just the fact that I felt so much better in a nicer space, that my emotions were so easily swayed by something as simple as a well-lit room with extra floor space was unsettling.
But I brushed it off. I wouldn’t guilt myself right now. It had been a long day with all the travel and now, being given the opportunity, I would rest.
During the half hour we’d spent downstairs figuring out how to check in and then hearing all about the place, we’d jumped to the worst possible conclusion, mentally prepared for doom, only to be completely blindsided by the reality.
Moral of the story? Don’t judge a book by its cover.
(But also, do your research beforehand so you don’t accidentally book yourself and your mom into a love hotel. I don’t think they’re all as nice as the one we luckily got.)