Our newlywed reporter tests Japans Let Me Sleep Quietly Mask to stop snoring help hubby get Zs

Sure, it looks crazy, but is it crazy enough to work?

We recently talked about how back in the spring our Japanese-language reporter Mariko Ohanabatake moved to a different part of Tokyo. What we didn’t yet mention is why she moved. She got married!

For the most part, Mariko’s days are filled with newlywed bliss. However, similar to how Mariko is having to adjust to the colorful new neighborhood she’s living in, she realizes that her husband is having to adjust to something too: Mariko’s steady, sonorous snoring.

Mariko has always been a loud snorer, but now that she’s sharing a bed with someone, she’s concerned that it’s affecting her hubby’s sleep. He’s too nice to complain to her about it, but Mariko can’t imagine her snoring isn’t making it tough for him to catch enough Zs, and so she’s been looking for ways to address the problem.

She’s tried using the nose clip pictured below, but not only did it do nothing to quiet her snoring, it also made her look kind of silly.

▼ That would be an acceptable tradeoff if this thing solved the problem, but since it doesn’t, it’s effectively just a weird-looking accessory.

But Mariko hasn’t given up hope yet, and on a recent trip to discount retailer Don Quijote, she came across the Let Me Sleep Quietly Mask.

The package doesn’t specifically say it’s for snoring, but you really couldn’t say it’s letting you sleep quietly if it still lets you snore, right? Under that logic, Mariko decided to give the 1,639-yen (US$12.15) Let Me Sleep Quietly Mask (which is only available at Don Quijote) a try.

In simple terms, the mask is a set of straps that keeps your mouth from flopping open as you sleep. The box says this will also help prevent you from waking up with a dry mouth and sore throat, but it’s the ostensibly snore-less silence that Mariko is interested in.

The diagramed instructions looked simple enough to follow, but Mariko got a bit of a shock when she opened the box and took the product out…

…since, if you don’t know otherwise, it really does look like a pair of crotchless string panties.

▼ Sexy snoring?

The Let Me Sleep Quietly Mask looked a lot less steamy, though, once she adjusted the Velcro straps and had it on her head.

Mariko’s first impression was that it looked kind of like boxing headgear, but some of that sporty aura dissipated when she noticed that it also gave her a noticeable case of duck face.

When Mariko tried to move her jaw, though, she didn’t feel like a pugilist or a waterfowl. Instead, she felt, she said, like Hannibal Lecter, since the straps made it so that she couldn’t open her mouth.

So would this pseudo-Silence of the Lambs cosplay result in the silence of the snores? With the Let Me Sleep Quietly Mask firmly in place, Mariko laid her head down on the pillow and drifted off into sleep. When morning came, though, she had no trouble opening her mouth wide for a pre-getting out of bed yawn, though, because…

…during the night she’d unconsciously undone the straps and tossed the mask on the floor, all apparently without waking up!

However, the experiment wasn’t a total failure. When Mariko asked her husband, he said that initially, while she’d still had the mask on, she had indeed been sleeping quietly. Once she peeled it off in the middle of the night, though, the snoring started.

Mariko wondered if this meant she was going to have to bind her hands before going to bed in order to stop snoring, but before resorting to such drastic measures she decided to try the mask again the next night, and this time the results were better. After a few days, she’s now up to about a 50-percent chance of keeping the mask on until morning and sleeping snorelessly all night.

So Mariko has decided to keep at it, hoping that as time goes by she’ll get more and more used to sleeping with the mask on. Of course, while that’s happening her husband is probably also going to get more and more used to some snoring sounds coming from the other side of the bed, so hopefully bit by bit they’ll be able to reach a happy, and restful, balance. And even if Mariko does feel a little self-conscious about how the Let Me Sleep Quietly Mask looks, it’s still not quite as dramatically unusual as some of the other products she’s tested.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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