Capsule Hotel: Kotoyo

**This should be read as a pairing with Capsule Hotel: Sumi and other Capsule Hotel entries

Kotoyo holds the mop firmly in her hand. “The animals,” she thinks to herself as she absorbs the semen-stained sheets, the used condoms, the empty poppers. With a gloved hand and a grimace, she removes the evidence, attempts to bring the capsule back to a sterile state which is what her job’s end-goal truly is: utter neutrality and sterility.

For years she had worked the cramped halls and washed out stalls of the Green Plaza Shinjuku, had watched as the elite businessmen and women that had missed their commuter trains out of the city were replaced by vacancies, then semi-vagrants, then the long-term residents who stayed for months on end because the rents were cheaper than regular apartments and occasionally the rich, white, teenage tourists that prowled the streets of Tokyo looking for an “authentic” Japanese experience. Kotoyo was the unknown constant in all of their lives, the woman that weaved in and out of their lived experiences, readying their living spaces for the next day. In essence, she was the keeper of time within the capsule hotel, making sure day in and day out that time, at least within the hotel, had not moved and that in a city besieged by entropy, the Green Plaza Shinjuku remained static.

She walks around the corner, sees a forlorn boy sitting on the edge of his cubicle. It is not the first time that she has seen someone with such a look nor will it be the last. Many young Japanese men and women have traveled from pristine and spacious landscapes beset by utter poverty in the hopes that here in Tokyo, life would be easier, that they could attain what they see on the television. Most found what this boy and others had found: a dirty, fast-paced metropolis that shoved its inhabitants into smaller and smaller spaces and charged them more and more money, a city that seemed utterly indifferent to the quality of life of its citizens. Kotoyo slaps the mop to the ground, begins to weave it though the crooks and crannies of the tiled floor below and watches the boy as he slumps to the ground and his knees nearly give way. He rolls off down the hallway, dirty towel in hand, to begin another day in the Tokyo grind.

Sounds erupt from inside the steely capsules. She had become accustomed to the coughs, the wheezing, the snorts and farts but hears a woman crying and this, she knows, she will never get used to. She mops harder, tries to drown the sound out with the scraping of the metal now worn through the dirtied fibers of the mop on the hallway tiles. She can hear it still, remembers when she was just a girl and had traveled up from Akitakata near Hiroshima after her mother had died of cancer and her father was in need of hospitalization. Her plan had been to come to Tokyo, find a job and send money back to her father’s brother who would give her father the necessary care to ease the pain of his prostate cancer. She had planned to do this within the month but things hadn’t gone according to plan. That month had turned into six and she barely had enough to buy food and shelter for herself, let alone send money back to her father. She had found the Green Plaza, had been able to rent one of the capsules for cheap if she worked there, and soon after quit her job selling clothing at a run-down department store to mop the halls clean of transient decay. It was a few months later that she received a letter informing her that her father had passed away. It was then that she had cried within the capsule, heard the reverberations of her pain along plastic corridors and cement partitions.

Kotoyo continues her daily routine, finishes mopping the corners of the hallways and pulls out the disinfectant spray. She walks calmly down the hallway, her rubber sneakers squeaking on the newly polished floors, reaches the communal sinks and with a sweeping left to right movement, coats the sinks with an even coat of cleanliness. She hears the bacteria whimpering, imagines them writhing with pain and she smiles faintly. This is the favorite moment of her job.

She thinks of the time that has passed, the different inhabitants that have marked the years. She has traversed the social standings of servant to caretaker, from the lowly worker under the careful watch of the wealthy business elite to the nice old lady that cleans people’s sheets to the tourists and long-term renters. She has become many things to many people and in so doing, has largely lost what it means to be anything to herself.

Toilet brush in hand now, she begins to scrub away the feces of yesterday hoping to attain once again that pristine, white ceramic bowl that brings her comfort, lathers her with ease. “One day soon,” she thinks to herself, “I will go home.”