Personal Room

After a year and a half in Tokyo, it finally happened: I missed the last train.

Back home, it was never an issue. One bitched about how long one might have to wait until the next night tram, but it does come eventually (except when it doesn't, but that's a completely different story). Waiting for 22 minutes might look like an eternity when your feet hurt and you have thin soles and it's snowing, but it's not really all that long.

In Tokyo, everything stops around midnight, and it doesn't budge until five hours later. And while back home I might have chosen to walk if I didn't feel like gambling for a night tram (or, when I moved, I might just have walked home), it's not an option here: my home is nowhere near walking distance from, well, anything.

What happened was this: I went to milonga with a friend (last one [milonga, not friend], as it turns out, as she ships out to Dominican Republic in a couple of days. "See you in two years", she said, but... "then, who alive, who dead", as my people are wont to say). Milongas are rather famous for starting late and ending later still, and it holds true even in Tokyo (except for the previous one, where suddenly everyone went home at 22-23h - what's up with that?), and... well, not much to tell really, the first sentence tells it all. I got stuck in Ikebukuro at thirty past midnight.

Now, I evaluated my options, which I all knew only theoretically by now. I could take a cab. It would get me home, and cost me quite a bit. That was the usual recourse for my tango friend, but she was always all grumbly about how much money she ends up wasting on it.

Also, there are hotels all over Tokyo, in a variety of flavours. In order of decreasing price and increasing sleaziness: There's real hotels, which cost real money. There's love hotels, but I guess it's strange if you don't have company. And there's capsule hotels, where (I am told) you can hear a roomful of strangers snore.

Another option was, I could crash in a karaoke box; but I didn't really want to sing, and karaoke boxes are kind of loud. Normally you don't hear other people singing, but only because there's someone in your own box yelling his or her heart out. (Actually, most people I went with sing very very well; only some actually yell. Details.) If you're not singing, the bloody karaoke machine still insists on playing loud music by itself. (I learned that when I went to karaoke with a friend, and we were trying to have a conversation. We quickly gave up and just sang.) And if you manage to turn that down, you start hearing people yelling their hearts out in the neighbouring boxes. Not really a place I would go to spend a restful night; but it's an option. A lot of karaoke places have a night rate, where you pay a fixed amount for the six or so hours past the point of no return; it's not that cheap, but if you like karaoke, it's a nice enough option.

Then there are manga cafes, or internet cafes - most offer both, to be clear, so these are largely synonyms. You rent a cubicle, kind of like in a internet cafe most of my readers are used to, and there's a computer you can use. That's where the similarity stops, because in a western internet cafe you can't normally borrow a comic book, and they don't normally work 24/7. They also have a night rate, so you can rent your cubicle and just crash until your train starts rolling.

Anyway, as all this was going through my head, fighting for dominance in my mind's arena, I noticed a sign fortuitously just in front of me: Personal Rooms, in B1 (first floor underground). The terms of use were also posted, and... it's a kind of internet cafe. Why didn't they just say so? And they had a "night course" for ¥2000, which I thought was pretty decent for renting a room for up to twelve hours (10pm-10am). You could even borrow a DVD. Each customer even gets one "joke goods" for free. Huh. So, in I went.

The thing I should have realised was this: There were about 25 shelves crammed into a small reception room, with the composition as follows: 3 shelves of manga, 1 shelf of foreign movies, 1 shelf of domestic movies; and the rest was occupied by... another kind of cinematography. Mostly domestic, but one shelf was again reserved for countries where blonditude does not necessarily come from a bottle.
(I like blonditude, and I don't care that it's not a word. It sounds way better than blondness. Blonditude. Blonditude. Or perhaps, blondosity, for certain people.) Next to the counter window which was at the right height for two bellies to converse face-to-face (one has to love the Japanese penchant for privacy), the wall sported the menu of "joke goods", most of which were in an amusing cylindrical shape.

At the time I registered (or rather, shown my ticket bought at the automatic ticket selling machine to the belly behind the counter), I was given the choice of a reclining mat or a massage chair. Now massage chairs are supposed to be good for relaxing, but since I wanted to at least try to sleep (insomnia still going strong), I was definitely more inclined to recline, and declined a massage chair. I ordered a wake-up call, since the rates for oversleeping are draconian when compared to what I paid for the whole night (¥500 for 30 minutes).

I was then shown to my personal room. (Actually, I was shown the door to the half-metre wide corridor where the rooms were. I entered and locked the door behind me, then spent the next five minutes trying to kick back on the reclining mat (since 80% of the width of the room were taken by the mat, leaving just about a foot width of "passageway". Above one's knees there are a DVD player, a keyboard, and a huge LCD TV; and next to one's elbow there's a phone, an ashtray and two (!) boxes of wipes. In case of any sudden leakages. The room stank a bit, but luckily only of old tobacco (one of rare opportunities for me to put luck and tobacco in the same sentence).

All in all, a minor adventure was had. It's cheap, and it could have been much worse. For instance, if I was a woman, I suppose.

In closing, two words: Doomsday sucks. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you have a choice between porn and Doomsday, pick porn. Seriously. Porn is way more believable and has a way better plot.