Lost Girls and Love Hotels (15 page)

T
he day before I leave Canada, I go to see Frank at the group home. It’s an ugly duplex on a street of ugly duplexes. A toothless middle-aged woman in a tube-top follows me from the street. “Can you buy me a coffee?” she whines.

“I’m in a hurry,” I tell her.

The woman’s expression barely passes to disappointed. A split second of the normal human condition. Then, like a skipping record, she asks me again, with the same hope and confidence, “Can you buy me a coffee?”

The past doesn’t scar her.

I press a dollar into her palm. “Lucky bitch,” I say.

Frank’s room is neat. Books on the shelf. Towels on the racks. Cupboard doors shut. It scares me. Above his desk are two of his pen-and-ink drawings. One of Toronto City Hall. The other of a giant alien insect shooting a laser beam
at a barn. Frank is sitting there at the desk. Just sitting there.

“Hey Frankie.”

He turns and watches me. Then, finally, he says hello.

“I’ve come to say good-bye.”

“Good-bye?”

“I’m going to Asia on Saturday. Don’t know how long for.”

“Acidophilus,” he tells me.

“Thailand. India. Japan. What did you say?”

“To replace intestinal flora?”

“Oh. Like for Delhi Belly. Okay.”
Acidophilus. Fuck
. “Frank are you doing okay?”

“I talk to someone every day.”

“Like a doctor?” I ask.

He turns back to his desk. There’s nothing on it. Not a pencil or a blotter.

“I have cable,” he answers.

“Frank?” His face looks like a mask to me. “How do the drugs make you feel?” It’s what I want to know.

“They don’t make me feel,” he tells me.

There’s a parcel waiting for me at the guesthouse. A tiny box wrapped in paper and brown string. The sight of it startles me. No one knows where I am. I turn it in my hands. “Who left this?” I ask the girl. She leans in, stifles a giggle. “Handsome man. No hair. Five minutes before.” I turn and run outside. Squint into the shadows. Suddenly the city is
deserted. Just me and the cherry trees and their pink arms. My feet are bare. I grip the pavement with my toes. Rooted.

Frank with his wild mind. Dad with his shiny new family. Mom with her soft new lovers. And me. Me with the sweet pain of home.

The wind comes up. Cherry blossom petals rain down on me.

I tell myself, there is no happy ending. All the pieces do not fit together perfectly. Things are ragged and messy. We are torn apart by events. Put back together differently by others. And somehow everything is beautiful.

I undo the string. Take the top off the box and pull out a cloud of tissue. Nestled on a bed of satin is Kazu’s finger. Unsullied by blood. A compass showing me the way. Out of the basin of Kyoto, off this beautiful island, back to the beginning. Home.

About the author

Meet Catherine Hanrahan

About the book

Writing a “Love Letter to Japan”

Read on

“Miss Foreigner! Go back. It’s sleeping time”: Catherine Hanrahan on Japan’s Love Hotels

Meet Catherine Hanrahan

C
ATHERINE
H
ANRAHAN
was born in Montreal and raised in Halifax and Toronto. A self-described bookworm, early she vacillated between a desire to write and a desire to become a ballerina. “My parents gave me a typewriter and a copy of
How to Get Happily Published
for Christmas when I was ten,” she says. “All literary ambitions were put on the back burner at age fourteen when I discovered boys.”

Her father is a professor of finance, her mother a former laboratory instructor at the local university.

Young Catherine’s reading interests ranged far and wide, from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s
Secret Garden
to Graham Greene’s
Dr. Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party.
It was
The Secret Garden,
she says, which “more than
anything made me want to become a writer.” Graham Greene, on the other hand, became an influence courtesy of her mother, “a G.G. fanatic.”

At college, Catherine first pursued an English degree, then moved on to comparative religion, and, finally, took a degree in philosophy. “I don’t remember much—it’s a bit hazy,” she says. “But I was an aerobics instructor and I had rather scary biceps.”

Over the years, she has worked a good many nonliterary jobs, including a host of waitress positions. Other jobs include bar hostess in Tokyo, English teacher, barmaid in London, and work at a New Age resort in Thailand (“I was barefoot for two months straight”). During periods of unemployment, she says, “I’ve made ends meet by filling out online surveys and selling off my shoe and handbag collection on eBay.”

She is a past participant in the Wired Writing Studio at the Banff Centre for the Arts, to which she applied while living in Japan. “At the time,” she recalls, “I had only written a few short stories and I didn’t expect to get in, but I did, and the whole experience (two weeks residency and six months online mentorship) was incredibly encouraging. It really cemented my aspirations as a writer. After that I took writing as a career out of the
About the author pipe-dream slot and just went for it.” What, then, does she think about writing workshops in general? “I’m not convinced that workshops make people write better,” she says, “but they certainly provide structure and community. As an antidote to creative isolation, writing programs are brilliant.”

The germ for
Lost Girls and Love Hotels
appeared in a short story published online at
Zoetrope All-Story Extra.
She submitted the story, “Watch the Monkey Scare the Children,” through
Zoetrope
’s online workshop—which she calls her “link to the writing community”—while she was in Japan. Asked whether her story appealed to
Zoetrope
owing to a cinematic quality, she replies: “I’m not sure if it is cinematic so much as weird. Being a bit weird has always got me noticed.”

Lost Girls and Love Hotels
amassed approximately eight rejection slips, she says. How did she deal with the rejection? “Honestly, I’ve never been bothered by rejection. Doubt and the tendency towards despondency is something that all writers have to deal with. I deal with it by being very single-minded—I simply refuse to indulge myself in doubt. I’m reminded of that
Saturday Night Live
skit where Stuart Smalley does the cheesy affirmations ‘I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!’ I did the writerly version of that. I got my fair share of rejections, but I just got on with it. I guess I’m stubborn. And maybe a bit of a born-again Pollyanna. And I have a fantastic agent (that helps, too).

Carol Shields once called Canada a “very good country for writers.” “We don’t,” she explained, “have a long literary tradition. People aren’t intimidated by the ghost of Hemingway or Faulkner.” Catherine agrees. “Canada
is
a very good country for writers, but I would say it from a practical perspective. The Canadian government supports writers with grants. Canadians also read a lot—literary or nonmainstream books regularly top the bestseller list in Canada. I’ve spent much of my adult life as an expat, but it is always nice to come back home. For writers and artists there is definitely something nurturing about Canada.”

Her parents remain highly supportive of her writing. “When the novel was accepted for publication, my parents asked me to send them a copy of the manuscript to read. I had to warn them about the sex and drugs in the story,
to which my dad responded, ‘Well then send it in a plain brown wrapper.’”

Catherine’s weapon of choice is a Mac iBook. “I always write at cafés,” she says. “I like the din of people around me. I also like coffee. Halfway through the novel I quit smoking, which was weird since in Japan there was always a cloud of ciggie smoke surrounding me when I wrote.” Her beverage ritual looks something like this: coffee before 2
P.M
., Guinness after.

Her hobbies are yoga and knitting. Asked about her enthusiasms, she quips, “Do high heels count as an enthusiasm?”

She is engaged to an English firefighter. “Andrew and I met in a bar in Vancouver,” she says. “He was in Canada doing a Yoga teacher training course and I’d just finished doing a cleansing fast. When he overheard that I was breaking my fast with a pint of beer he knew we were meant for each other. We have barely been apart since then.”

Writing a “Love Letter to Japan”

T
HE STORY BEHIND THE BOOK
begins in Japan, where I lived for five years. It also begins with Hiroshi, the Japanese chef whom I dated on and off for three years. Like Kazu in the novel, Hiroshi was handsome, charismatic, and spoke a strangely poetic truncated English. Hiroshi is a book unto himself. During our relationship he was pressured by his family into an
omiae
(the polite Japanese term for an arranged marriage). He fell ill suddenly (just like in the soap operas). While hospitalized he was wheeled out of the institution in a tuxedo and married in a lavish ceremony (complete with a “fake” minister), all the while connected to an IV tube. He divorced soon after recovering from his illness, was briefly disowned by his parents, and after some struggles eventually realized his dream of opening his own restaurant.

Throughout our relationship Hiroshi and I would meet at love hotels. Sometimes we’d go to one down the street from my apartment, not because we had to hide away, but just for the fun of it.

As this drama unfolded I was
About the book working for a big English conversation school company. Picture McDonald’s, but instead of hamburgers, English conversation is hawked. Actually, the job wasn’t all that bad. Better than my previous jobs in Japan, among them pronunciation corrector at a helicopter pilot school, hostess in a bar (lighting businessmen’s cigarettes and brushing their hands off my knee), and a brief stint handing out packets of Kleenex in front of train stations.

The English conversation company also ran stewardess training courses.

Being a flight attendant for a Japanese woman is equivalent to being a lawyer or physician in the West. Competition is fierce. Only women who graduate from prestigious universities have a shot at jobs with Japan Airlines or ANA. I felt this bizarre phenomenon begged to be explored in fiction. I had this idea about a very dislocated, depressed young woman who is plunked down in the world of the stewardess school. I’d been writing short stories for a year or so. One night in my tiny tatami mat room in Kyoto I wrote the first paragraph of a short story entitled “Watch the Monkey Scare the Children.”

It took me a week to write the
story. I fell in love with the characters: Margaret, the world-weary English teacher fleeing from her past; and Frank, her sweetly weird brother who succumbs to the ravages of schizophrenia. The story was a success. It was picked up by an online edition of a literary magazine. I knew I’d hit on something and couldn’t abandon Margaret and Frank. I decided to turn the story into a novel.

But the story needed something else when expanded to novel length. It needed romance. I created Kazu, a character whose life bears only a faint resemblance to Hiroshi’s, but who embodies all of his sexy foreign appeal, his essential goodness, and his penchant for love hotel trysts.

The novel took two years to finish, and during that time I decided to leave Japan and return to Canada. In a strange way it was easier to write about Japan when I was thousands of miles away, as though time and distance called into relief all that is bizarre and beautiful about living in Tokyo. In a way, the novel is my love letter to Japan, the country that I grew to admire and respect fiercely, and to Hiroshi, who was a foreign country unto himself.

“Miss Foreigner! Go back. It’s sleeping time.” Catherine Hanrahan on Japan’s Love Hotels

W
HILE LIVING IN
J
APAN
I came up with the idea of a novel set in love hotels, the kitschy, pay-by-the-hour inns huddled around train stations and nightspots. The
rabu-hoteru,
I thought, would be the perfect setting for my story of culture shock, sex, and death in turn-of-the-millennium Tokyo. So, with the kind assistance of my Japanese boyfriend I set out to do
research.
What I found was a peculiarly Japanese institution that illuminates a guilt-free, playful attitude toward sex and a love of all things cheesy.

To those who travel to Japan in search of Zen gardens and geisha the idea of visiting gaudy two-hour love nests with revolving beds might seem ludicrous. In many ways, though, going to a love hotel is the quintessential Japanese experience. It’s practical, almost completely automated, flashy, gaudy, and surprisingly cheap.

In Japan’s predominantly urban society, where more often than not three generations of a family live together in small apartments, love
hotels provide a much-needed private place for sex. Parents with small children use love hotels; so do grandparents. Pretty much everyone seems to use them. It’s all very matter-of-fact: no moral issues, no “not in my neighborhood.” If anything, love hotels are becoming
more
acceptable in Japanese society. The
rabu-hoteru
is going upscale. Most young people no longer use the term “love hotel,” but prefer the classier “fashion hotel” moniker.

Some trace the origin of the modern love hotel to small pensions that were set up next to shrines and temples for pilgrims to “relax” after a tough day of meditating. This juxtaposition of the sacred and profane makes sense if you look at the Japanese
kami
or gods, who like those of Greek legend were quite the randy bunch.

Love hotels began to flourish in the 1950s, when the typical “sex and shower” establishment began to pop up near train stations in big cities. At first these hotels aped the
ryokan,
or traditional Japanese inn, with simple tatami mat floors and shoji screen partitions. But come the 1960s hotels catering to the “Western” idea of romance started to appear. The Japanese may have no word for kitsch, but it is alive and well at the love hotel. With
their plastic tile and fake wood, their Corinthian columns and rococo bathrooms, the modern love hotel is so bad it’s good.

Most love hotels operate on similar systems. To ensure their guests can fully relax love hotels are models of discretion. Anonymity is assured through the apparent absence of human staff. Underground parking and entrances to the hotels are hidden from view. Guests are greeted in the lobby with a backlit panel displaying photographs of available rooms. Most love hotels offer rooms for a “rest” (usually one to three hours and ranging in price from thirty to fifty dollars) and a stay (usually ten
P.M
. to noon the next day for sixty to one hundred dollars). Lights on the floor act as a sparkly trail to the love nest, which is unlocked and waiting.

Foreigners visiting love hotels are often baffled by some of the establishments’ protocol. The doors to the rooms, for example, cannot be opened from inside in most hotels. Locks are encased in a plastic dome and the rooms can only be exited by calling reception and asking the attendant to remotely unlock the door. A friend of
mine found herself trapped in a love hotel room, unable to read the sign on the door and unable to communicate in Japanese with the reception desk. She and her boyfriend ended up pounding on the wall until a horrified attendant arrived at the door and clicked his tongue at them for five minutes. I’ve always thought that this system made for very effective fire traps, but my Japanese friends insist that it is necessary. If you could simply open the door and stroll into the hallways at will, two couples could bump into one another and lose face.

Then there’s the issue of how to pay. Old-school love hotels still use the vacuum chute system. I like this one best. You call the front desk and ask for your bill and
swoosh!
—a plastic tube appears in a vacuum chute embedded in the wall. You put your cash in the tube (Japan is predominantly a cash-only society), push a button, and
swoosh!
—the money disappears into the chute, discretion assured. In other hotels you pay on your way out. A disembodied pair of hands behind a small curtained window near the door takes your money and you’re on your way.

Inside, the rooms range from
standard hotel fare to Disneyesque castle interiors to S&M dungeons, and are fully automated. The TV, radio, and lights can be controlled from the headboard. Drinks, snacks, and sex toys (usually displayed on a “Sexy Goods” menu) can be bought from in-room vending machines or from room service. Most rooms offer an astounding array of mood music choices, ranging from Japanese pop to Swiss yodeling. There’s usually an alibi station as well—the sounds of traffic or the pitch and roll of a train—just in case one’s significant other calls.

In recent years, partly due to the introduction by the Japanese government of the “New Public Morals Act,” love hotels have cleaned up their sleazy image. Catering more and more to the “OL” market (office ladies, or young unmarried working women), the porn is making room for DVD libraries featuring
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Romantic themes are replacing the male-oriented race car and spaceship rooms. Women can buy cutesy “fashion hotel” guidebooks which detail the perfect hotel in which to “rest” after a romantic date.

My favorite love hotels were those
with outrageously tacky theme rooms—revolving merry-go-round beds, spaceship showers—but my boyfriend, apparently like most hip young Japanese, preferred the “classy” establishments. These hotels, which seemed to me to be a bad satire of Western “luxury,” attract the martini-sipping clubgoers with their panoramic views, luxury toiletries, and faux French provincial furniture.

The continuing recession has inspired some innovative marketing practices. One hotel offered a free trip to Tokyo Disneyland for any couple who used each of its twenty-four rooms in a six-month period. A sex marathon for Mickey Mouse—what could be more Japanese? One establishment we visited rewarded us for our patronage with two ballpoint pens and a comb. At another hotel our receipt was accompanied by coupons for free soft-serve ice-cream cones.

In all the love hotels I visited I only encountered a staff member once. It was in a simple hotel near Narita airport in Tokyo. I was staying there overnight to avoid an early morning trip to catch my flight. In the middle of the night I ventured out into the hall, having run
out of bottled water in the stuffy room (at this particular hotel I wasn’t locked in). I wandered around for a bit, feeling a little naughty and curious, until a door disguised as part of the wall in the lobby opened. A tiny old man in a tight-fitting blue suit hobbled out and in a stage whisper called to me, “Miss Foreigner! Go back. It’s sleeping time.”