She herself had a high tolerance for all of it, for the people who came and the stilted conversations conducted largely through hand gestures, for the puddles they left on her bathroom floor, the laundry she did free of charge, the loads of food they consumed at her table and the way they sometimes threw their clothes all over her tatami room. She was even tolerant of the French, who she admitted, when pressed, could be the most challenging guests of all. It was a labor, to be sure, but it was profitable, and it also seemed to mean something to her. One of her daughters lived in Los Angeles for eight years, and Miki had gone for extended visits. She knew acutely what it felt like to be dislocated, the stun of a country that’s not your own. She offered a steadying, if not particularly glamorous, refuge. She served people tea made with herbs from her garden and rice cakes wrapped in seaweed. She unfolded their green-sheeted futons before bed at night.

The more we talked with Miki, the more I wanted to go lie on her couch in front of her knickknack cabinet and wait for the next warm meal. My place, Ultimate Tokyo-Sized Experience!!, turned out to be clean and quiet (as advertised) but also strange and lonely. It was a spare, single bedroom, not more than eight feet wide, with a narrow foldout futon, a minifridge, minitelevision and minimicrowave and a flimsy door, behind which was a bathroom just big enough to fit a body. Like a lot of Airbnb listings, it was rented as “entire place” rather than “private room,” which meant no host was in residence. But in this case, I’m not sure any host was ever in residence. The listing was run by some sort of conglomerate or management company, and checking in involved no human interaction whatsoever. To get there, I carried my luggage up a neon-lit hill — past something called Hotel Fifteen Love, past places called Pub Slow Jam, Adult Shop Joyful and Baby Doll and a pet store that sold fluffed-up puppies and kittens and still somehow managed to look seedy — to the concrete apartment building where it was located. The door was unlocked. A key had been left inside. I had no idea where I’d landed.

Miki, despite the language barrier, seemed to know a lot about her guests. She described a woman who came to stay with her while she was on business in Japan and developed heat exhaustion, or maybe just exhaustion in general. (“She was so busy,” observed Miki.) There was a young guy who arrived from Korea, saying he just wanted to get away from his parents, who were pestering him to get married. (“He needed some quiet,” she said.) An Italian man came to stay and cried the whole time, confessing to Miki that he had cheated on his Japanese wife and now she’d left him. “I took him to the Emperor’s Palace to try and cheer him up,” she told us, adding that it didn’t work at all. Somewhere along the way, though, she delivered the kind of blunt-force, stranger-to-stranger advice that cuts handily across cultures. The man’s wife eventually took him back, Miki informed us, and she was happy to claim some of the credit: “I told him,” she said, shaking a finger as she described it, “he just had to stop with the affairs.”

Last winter, Airbnb conducted focus groups in Tokyo, gathering people who knew nothing about the service and showing them the Japanese-language version of the Airbnb website on smartphones, complete with the castles and the tree houses, the full flight of whimsy. Anne Kenny was part of the group that watched what happened through a one-way window. “It was clear that not everyone understood the concept,” she told me.

Those who did had questions — a lot of them. “It was: ‘What if this happens? What if that happens? What if I’m a guest, and my host makes me dinner, and I don’t want to finish it?’ ” Kenny recalled one morning as we sat in a cafe in Shibuya, not far from Love Hotel Hill. “Here they are, they haven’t booked a trip. They haven’t traveled. They’re just looking at a website, and already they’re going through the what-ifs.” One participant asked what would happen if he rented a place online and then, when he got there, it turned out to be a supermarket. Someone else studied a photo of a Western host posed casually with a coconut-water drink on her lap and, seeming flummoxed, asked, “How would I even address her?” It was, you might say, a full-on display of uncertainty-avoidance, though perhaps not surprising in a country that’s routinely walloped by volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and typhoons and was, at the time, just a few years past a horrifying tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. Still, it didn’t necessarily bode well for business.

There was one woman, however, who grasped the idea immediately. “She was like: ‘I can stay in a castle? You put castles on this site? That’s amazing,’ ” Kenny said. She pulled out her laptop and showed me a photo taken at the focus group. A half-dozen young women sat around a conference-room table; five of them were dressed in gray or black. The sixth wore an electric orange sweater. She, of course, was the castle-lover, an instant icon for Kenny and her colleagues. “There was something so distinct in her mannerisms,” Kenny said. “Even from behind the window, you could see she was genuinely excited about it. It was like: What is it about this woman in the bright orange sweater that makes her more interested in the idea of Airbnb, even as all her peers are focused on the worst-case scenarios?”