There is a familiar feeling here: existential dread, impending doom, a light dose of despair. Here, in a hotel, on the double mattress—the kind that requires you climb up rather than lie down—I have the sense that death is near, somewhere between miniature shower gels and complimentary breakfast. In this cookie cutter replica of mundane luxury, this is what I’ve come to know: the end.
Imagining the hotel as the final frontier of existential gloom is not unique to me. I first realized this in reading Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, in which Toru Okada risks his life to get to a hotel, to fight something, to end something, to change something. It is familiar to anyone who has read (or seen the 2022 film adaptation) of White Noise, in which Jack Gladney, too, finds himself in a hotel and out of options. The two books come from different decades and languages (White Noise was published in English in 1985, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was published in Japanese in three parts in 1994–1995), yet their protagonists find themselves, in the closing folds of the pages, mysteriously drawn to the same irreverent location, armed and willing to kill. And sometimes I feel it too—minus the weapons, minus any desire to kill. The individually wrapped bar soaps and peculiarly located tissue dispensers that surround me tie my existence to theirs, to these emblems of twentieth-century ennui. “All plots tend to move deathward,” Jack says early in White Noise. He is wrong. All plots tend to move toward hotels.
***
When I imagine a hotel room, an untouched illusion of goodness is what I think of—at least half the time, when I manage to avoid thinking of the many bodies here before. A part of me always imagines blacklight images showing stains from semen, blood, and urine that score the entirety of the room like a raved-up Jackson Pollock with no place else to go. And if there are no stains, it would only be proof of a history so grotesque as to justify the battalion of cleaners employed to erase it.
What I see is that pure and untouched landscape, a space where I might abandon the pains of just existing, escape the gruel of my everyday life—a life where I stare at computer screens before, during, and after an eight-hour shift that feels laughably well-defined given how the labor of eye against blue light continues unendingly. This, in essence, is why Jack and Toru arrive in their hotel rooms as well, albeit with a bit more plot on the way.
It was in a hotel during a family trip to Florida that I first read White Noise. I picked it up because someone had told me that the book was better than the band named after it, because I wanted to feel the effects of its airborne toxic event, “heart palpitations and a sense of déjà vu.” Those adolescent beach vacations became so regular they ceased to feel like a getaway, just a continuation—the avocado-colored geometric paintings on the wall of the condo we always stayed in, the familiar rest stops and McDonald’s along the way, all of it a pattern, and each trip book-ended by a long and lifeless drive.
As much as we may relate the hotel room with escape and intrigue, it is rarely the catalyst of either. Yet here I am again, in a hotel, looking for something, telling myself that the dark, squiggle-covered carpet is better than the floor I stand on at home. I find a way to believe that on this trip I will find some greater meaning that has eluded me until now. My climax is coming.
For Jack and Toru, the hotel provides that, the climax at least. They escape, or tumble toward conclusion, away from their mundane, if somewhat peculiar, lives. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle begins with Toru at home, unemployed, and bickering with a solicitor over his decision to eat morning spaghetti, before he leaves to try—and fail—to find a lost cat. In the opening of White Noise, Jack admits to growing a beard, gaining weight, and adding a fictive initial to his name, all for an increased impression of significance—he “invented Hitler studies” and has a reputation to maintain. Both characters want something more, but by the end, they chase their lovers, some unknown evil, and the hope for some sense of purpose into a hotel.
So when I am alone in my hotel and I feel that longing for meaning, I think of Jack and Toru, of their hotel room battles against death and fate, against a cuckolding pill-dealer and a still unseen nemesis. They have a gun, a baseball bat. What do I have? A couple of books?
Their hotel experiences are not like the ones that most of us encounter. Those usually involve mediocre TV, mediocre sex, mediocre takeout food—little of note save, perhaps, an interesting window view of an unfamiliar city. Hotels are predictable. Look up pictures from the fifties, the eighties, the nineties: the colors have changed, the amenities have been updated, but from the layout of the room to the furniture inside, hotels remain the same.
This may be why hotels work so well in books and movies. A hotel is a known entity. Yes, we can say, I have been here too. They’re key to the setting of Steven King’s The Shining and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and important stopping points in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. These as in many stories serve as a destination, a place recognizable yet other than what we already know.
In White Noise and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, though, the hotel serves as a separate and distinct endpoint. Those hotels function closer to the one in British writer Doris Lessing’s 1963 short story, “To Room Nineteen.” In it, Susan, a woman with apparent happiness and success, seeks an escape from the “dry, controlled wistfulness which is the distinguishing mark of the intelligent marriage.” She feigns contentment with her husband and four children. But when they leave for the day, she escapes in secret to a hotel, which becomes, as it is for Jack and Toru, a setting for existential collapse. (It’s worth noting that Jorge Luis Borges visits his own room nineteen in “August 25, 1983,” a more surreal story, but still a story where it appears at least one version of him is facing the end in a hotel.)
Lessing sits at the cusp between modernism and postmodernism, and “To Room Nineteen” shows a shifting aim of fiction around that time, one in which a joyous young adulthood, sophisticated marriage, pleasant children, and economic security still don’t provide a “reason for living,” as Lessing puts it. Her story transforms those common signs of a life well lived into something else. Susan instead sees her existence plagued by “the enemy—irritation, restlessness, emptiness, whatever it was.”
In that sense, Lessing anticipates a perspective on life that grew prevalent through the end of the century. “It seems that one of the things about living now is that everything presents itself as familiar,” David Foster Wallace observed in a 1993 interview, the year before Murakami’s first installment of Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, “so one of the things the artist has to do now is take a lot of this familiarity and remind people that it’s strange.” (Wallace’s 1,100-page magnum opus, Infinite Jest, doesn’t end in a hotel, but more people may have actually finished The End of the Tour, a film based on a book based on an article based on a promotional tour that tells the story of Wallace facing the existential pressure that came with literary success—and much of that takes place in hotels.) In Lessing’s story, the traditional measurements of fulfillment—and, with that, female complacency—become disturbed. Murakami and DeLillo, too, seek to alert readers to the uneasiness of all that is familiar, to all that is unsettled just below the surface of the things we take for granted.
Until the climaxes, Jack and Toru move at slow and meandering paces. The narratives mirror the familiar monotony of a forty-hour work week, a relationship grown routine, the bland highway crawl to a hotel in some exciting locale. Both novels revel in a gradual reveal—the dailiness of life, the minutiae of our personal existences—and through this slow endeavor push us toward understanding, or at least recognizing, our lack of understanding.
As Wallace proposed, Murakami and DeLillo home in on the ways that life is not so rational or predictable. They depict the now familiar experience of a world that should be familiar but is instead strange. That’s the experience of Jack, who turns himself into “the false character that follows the name around,” and that’s an experience captured in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, written while Murakami lived outside his native Japan. “I was living in the US as a stranger,” he recounted in an interview with The Paris Review. “That ‘strangeness’ was always following me like a shadow and it did the same to the protagonist of the novel.”
Both novels focus more on escaping the shadow than escaping from it. They’re not novels of questions so much as novels of uncertainty. Jack and Toru find no true resolution in the hotel. Yet Murakami and DeLillo seem to propose something that seems laughably unimaginable: contentment with uncertainty and with the certainty of death. If we can only face our great uncertainty directly, attempt to vanquish it, and come away with the knowledge of what will always remain unknown, we can proceed to live better, happily, truly—something of that sort.
***
After my stay in the hotel, when I’ve collected the miniature toiletries and returned my plastic key card, I find myself once again surrounded by people as I walk through the airport and board the flight home.
When I reach my assigned row, the woman in the seat next to mine seems glad to see me. She stands to let me into the window seat, greets me almost like an old friend, like she’d been waiting for my arrival. Warmth emanates from this fifty-something stranger. Of course, she isn’t an old friend, and if she was waiting for someone it was no specific person, just a person. Like me, she traveled alone, had maybe stayed in her hotel room alone, and now welcomes a companion, however coincidental. But our bond sours when, two minutes later, I ask to be let out to grab a sweatshirt I’d forgotten in my overhead bag. The warmth is gone. She rises, moves aside, sits back down when I finish, all without a word or second glance in my direction.
As we settle into our individual realities for the flight, I can’t help but glance over enviously as she flips rapidly through a small book, jotting notes in pen. I do this at first because I suffer from a persistent anxiety that, contrary to my exceptional reading level circa sixth grade, I now read at an abnormally slow pace. I read even slower as curiosity leads my attention to her page numbers, to the size of her text (it’s larger than mine, and the pages are smaller, which gives some relief). My attention is fully captured when I notice a section titled How to Feel Feelings. Is she okay? Is the book advice? Maybe it’s a manual for therapists. She is either unselfconscious of her reading subject or too desperate to care what the strangers surrounding her might see.
In this I recognize something of my own reading of DeLillo, Lessing, and Murakami in particular. It’s not the same approach, but it’s somewhat of the same idea: a fundamental lack in understanding of what makes the world seem normal, apparently, to other people. Her book seems to say that there is an answer to loneliness and the longing for meaning. White Noise, “To Room Nineteen,” and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, though, pose the question: How can we feel so alone even in the face of life’s abundance? On my vacation, in my hotel, in a building full of people and designed to cater to my every need, I still cannot escape the feeling of isolation.
Toru describes this sensation when, nearing The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’s conclusion, he sits abandoned in the bottom of a well:
“My one-day absence was probably not having an effect on anybody. Not one human being had noticed that I was gone, likely. I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me.”
And suddenly the well has become a hotel. I am sleepless, staring vacantly at the ceiling. And maybe Jack is right, all plots move toward death. And when a plot goes nowhere, when a plot goes to the bottom of a well, covers the entrance, and dwells there for an entire chapter, it still moves toward death. When a being exists in reluctant isolation, they face death with or without a plot. Toru enters the well for answers or an end—he is a person powerless and out of options. Can we find our answers or only wait for them to arrive?
My hotel may be an attempt at forcing an answer, an attempt to gain control by upending my routine and monotony, by trading flat, cornfield-adjacent highways for a city skyline, by choosing the building next to the park, by convincing myself that the job is justified by the escape that it allows. I keep imagining that I will be like Jack and Toru, but I can’t seem to figure out what that means. Do I want the aching listlessness? The climatic near-death showdowns? Toru more or less concludes that he and his nemesis cannot survive together. A friend convinces Jack that “the killer, in theory, attempts to defeat his own death by killing others. He buys time, he buys life.” The plots move forward. Both men end up in hotels.
My story doesn’t peak like theirs. I stare at the ceiling, I roll over too many times, I struggle to get the shower temperature the way I like it. I imagine a world outside my hotel room that is different from the world I know every other day, that by trading my comforting room at home for this room-shaped replica of comfort I will find peace, love, happiness. Like DeLillo and Murakami do for Jack and Toru, I tell myself that this trip to someplace strange has done something for me. Or maybe, like Susan in “To Room Nineteen,” I’m desiring to be alone, to be somewhere else, somewhere other than the life that is familiar. But Susan can’t find that escape: “She could never forget herself; never really let herself go into forgetfulness.”
I think what I want as I leave my hotel is the impression of an ending. I want the sensation of closing the book. I want to know that I have absorbed all there is for me so I can continue on, back to a life outside of plots.
***
At home, I return to a world that is not strange, where the shadows blend into a background I’m familiar with. I will return to my work tomorrow. I will return to the screens that I have never left. No one will see me any different. They will ask how my trip was. I will tell them it was good. And I will get back to my screen and so will they.