Capsule Hotel

From the outside, the Riverside Asakusa looks seedy. The walls look white turned yellow, the lights advertising capsules for ¥ 3000 (£ 13/ € 19) a night are flickering on and off. Whatever. If it has a capsule for me to sleep in, I’m happy. I go to a nearby combini to get a drink, a tooth brush travel set, some green tea mushi-pan (chewy, steamed cake) for the next morning, and a dodgy manga to make all this a truly Japanese experience.
Then I brace myself and walk up the narrow winding staircase to the entrance of the capsule hotel. A friendly man with unusually big, brown eyes greets me in the lobby. The place is much cleaner and much more welcoming than expected. There are cereal bars on the counter that can be bought for a hurried breakfast, or midnight meal, a large lobby with sofas, vending machines, lockers to lock your shoes away, slippers to slip into. A man sits on one of the sofas watching TV and having a smoke. The place reminds me of a youth hostel.
The man at reception greets me in broken English. “Sleep in a box?” he asks. I reply in Japanese, which makes him happy. “A, you speak Japanese. That makes it easier. You’re on the eighth floor. Only for women that floor. Please give me the key for your shoe box.” I hand him my key and pay for the night. He gives me another key. I take the elevator up to the eighth floor. It opens into a room with a large wash basin and mirrors. Soap for washing your face, lotion, and moisturiser are supplied, neatly lined up in clean looking light blue bottles. There is a toilet where I find a notebook. I open it. It has the same sentence scribbled all over it, again and again, on every single page from beginning to end. This must be an important message. I take a deep breath as I start deciphering what I take as a sign from the God of capsule hotels (there are 8 million gods in Japan, so there must be one responsible for capsule hotels, too). His honourable message reads:
“I’m raising my heart to be free and wide as the sky. To be taken by nothing. To learn living without ties.”
I clap, not to ask for favours from the gods like people do here, but in a more Western fashion, to applaud the God of capsule hotels and thank him for his time and consideration, to leave this notebook here for me, behind the toilet door like a toilet cleaners’ log book, yet filled with such unexpected pearls of wisdom.
I wash the sweat left behind by a Tokyo adventure off me and brush my teeth. I lock away my things in one of the L-shaped lockers before the toilet and walk past the sink and mirror into the capsule room, remindful in its space saving fashion of a ship's interior, capsule beds lined up on both sides, bottom beds and top beds. People have made these capsules their homes for the night, putting out knickers and socks to dry, carefully arranging pairs of slippers before their doors. At the rear end of the two rows, on the bottom, I find my capsule. No 8018. It has a screen that can be closed to partly shut out the light outside that must burn through the night to welcome other guests who may arrive at any time under the moon. Inside my capsule, the sheets are white and soft. There is a radio and a TV. Watching it costs ¥ 100 for half an hour, and ¥ 500 for five hours. But I have my manga, so who needs TV. There is a light inside the capsule, too, that can be dimmed and brightened. I am content in my capsule, but keep reading my manga and cannot sleep because the light is coming in through the little wholes in my screen. More and more strange manga stories. More and more dotted light on my pillow. But I need to sleep, so the dots of light turn into sheep, and I start counting. Good night little seal. Good night, Anna. And finally, my consciousness is sealed for a few hours, light earthquake like vibrations leading into a haphazard chain of light little dreams, too light to be remembered by the time a full, bright morning pours in through my blinds and tells me to leave my capsule for the Tokyo Bay Hilton.