Denis de Rougemont wrote “Love in the Western World” (“L’Amour et l’Occident”) in the 1930s. In it he said, “Our eagerness for both novels and films with their identical type of plot; the idealized eroticism that pervades our culture and upbringing and provides the pictures that fill the background of our lives; our desire for ‘escape,’ which a mechanical boredom exacerbates — everything within and about us glorifies passion.” Today, the same conditions drive some Japanese, not necessarily to passion, but certainly to the “Love Hotels” that are the subject of Misty Keasler’s exhibition of 25 color photographs at the Jenkins Johnson Gallery.

Ms. Keasler photographed the hotels during an eight-month stay in Japan during 2004 and 2005. For those with limited imaginations, a Japanese love hotel is a place of assignation offering privacy for a couple to have sex; there are between 30,000 and 40,000 of them in the country. They can be rented by the hour or for the night, and interaction with hotel staff is minimal. Young couples often use love hotels, since many young Japanese people live with their parents. They are also commonly used for prostitution. But, as the diaries translated in Ms. Keasler’s book “Love Hotels: The Hidden Fantasy Rooms of Japan” (Chronicle, 156 pages, $40) make clear, they are also routinely used by married couples. What distinguishes them from the “hot bed” joints in the northern section of the Bronx is the extravagance of their fantasy décor.

New Yorkers used to the MTA may or may not have their libidos stimulated by the “Subway Room, Hotel Loire, Osaka,” a 30-inch-by-30-inch c-print (all the pictures are c-prints). One wall is entirely mirrored, but two others are covered with plastic-like material and have mirrors shaped as subway windows. There is a luggage rack above a vinyl seat, strip advertisements, and an overhead bar with grips for straphangers. The room, as in all the pictures, is unoccupied. Ms. Keasler’s photograph presents the space in a competent, forthright manner, without editorial comment.

There is the “Alien Abduction Play Area, Hotel Loire, Osaka,” the inside of a spaceship; “Artic Room, Snowmans Hotel, Kobe,” a plastic igloo; “Rounded Caged Bed, Hotel Pamploma, Osaka,” the floor, walls, and bars all red; “Bondage Cross, Hotel Loire, Osaka,” the symbol of the crucifixion equipped with handcuffs and a reproduction of a painting by Gustav Klimt on the wall, and the “Hallway With Trees,” in the same hotel, a benign passageway with a row of realistic trees down the middle that sprout from the floor and appear to go through the ceiling.

Some rooms have more specifically Japanese themes. “Tanuki Bathroom, Snowmans Hotel, Kobe” has a bathtub shaped like a native raccoon dog that appears in folklore as an absent-minded, jolly creature carrying a bottle of sake, an empty purse, and a worthless promissory note. It is traditionally represented with an enormous belly and huge testicles. In Ms. Keasler’s picture, we see the tanuki’s head at the foot of the tub, the waterspout in its mouth, the chain with the rubber stopper draper over its snout, and a comic water bottle on its head. The tanuki is indigenous, but the execution of the bathroom fixture seems indebted to Disney.

“Bondage Kitty (Hello Kitty S & M Room), Hotel Adonis, Osaka” is decorated with a stuffed doll of the saccharine cat wearing a blindfold and handcuffs, a giant plastic strawberry, and a red piano with a pink piano bench. “Sexy X Room” at the same hotel is not at all cute, nor is “Wallpaper,” a close up of the floor-to-ceiling wall covering in that room. The X is made of heavy timbers, painted black, and equipped with fetters for the hands and feet. The wallpaper is printed with reproductions of bound women. This is a subject I have come across many times in the work of Japanese photographers, including several of the most highly regarded, so I assume it is considered unexceptional.

The women pictured on the wallpaper are naked. Some of them simply have their hands tied behind their backs and their ankles bound, but others are trussed up in more ingenious ways. There is one with a rope around her neck. There are others secured with knots that would qualify an Eagle Scout for an advanced merit badge. And there are others with their limbs fettered who were photographed suspended by a rope from the ceiling. The 20 pictures are repeated over and over as the wallpaper makes its way around the room. The most disturbing aspect of this is that the women do not seem to care. It is all for the camera, but they express neither pleasure nor pain — mostly a dull acquiescence.

The point of de Rougemont’s “Love” was that Westerners require the stimulation of a drastically attenuated form of courtly romance for their “passion.” The Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki wrote his essay “In Praise of Shadows” in the same decade, the 1930s. In it he said, “We Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are.” But Tanizaki complained that the old ways were being forgotten. What would he make of the programmatic fictions on display in Misty Keasler’s “Love Hotels”?

wmeyers@nysun.com

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