If You Follow Me
Page 34
Some of the dioramas featured statues of real people—people still alive but obviously destined for hell—like tabloid queen Masami Hayashi, the infamous kare onna, or “curry lady,” who poisoned the curry she brought to a neighborhood potluck and killed a half-dozen people. Hayashi enraged the nation when she refused to explain why she did it, but everyone knew that her neighbors picked on her for not doing her share of chores, and for breaking gomi rules. Her actions were truly monstrous. Still, I understand how the gomi police could push a woman to extremes.
In Shika, the list of gomi separation rules was truly epic. Electronic goods were especially hard to dispose of, even though many people took pride in having the newest models and replaced them often. It cost a lot of money to get rid of a car. I should know, since I crashed three, proving that temporary people probably shouldn’t drive in Japan. I wouldn’t have been astonished to find a statue of myself, perhaps crammed into a garbage can, at the Museum of Hell. I said so to Chikako, who laughed, having heard of my gomi infractions. She told me to stand next to the statue of the “curry lady” for a photo. As I did, I noticed that we were exactly the same height.
Mawaki Onsen (and others)
Being naked in public felt weird the first few times. But I quickly became addicted to the Japanese baths, especially the onsens, or natural hotsprings, and shed my inhibitions along with my clothes. There are baths all over Japan, from the dazzling facilities at luxury hotels like the one where the entire faculty of Shika High School spent the night (attendance mandatory) over New Year’s, to the humble establishments in every neighborhood with signs depicting three plumes of steam. While I tried to sample as many as I could, as often as possible, my favorite bathhouse was undoubtedly Mawaki Onsen, located near the town of Wajima at the tip of the peninsula.
While the entrance fee at that time was just 300 yen, less than a convenience store sandwich, the natural setting rivaled the luxury of any hotel. Crown Princess Masako visited Mawaki Onsen on a trip to the Noto, and even though her fertility was the subject of endless media speculation at the time, she looks almost relaxed in the picture framed on the lobby wall.
Perched on the cliffs over the sea, dozens of rotemburo, or outdoor tubs, overflow down the jagged rocks, trickling into the raging surf below. On one side of the facility, divided by a high bamboo wall, are tubs made of a velvety cedar that leaves a lingering perfume on your skin. On the other side, the tubs are lined with smooth river rocks. The sides flip weekly between the sexes, and I could never decide which was my favorite. The bathhouse stays open until late at night, which is by far the best time to go, especially when it’s snowing. Nothing beats being naked in a blizzard, your body scalding while snow catches in your lashes and melts on your tongue.
The Noto Peninsula borders “Snow Country,” and it snows almost continuously from November through May. My friend Chikako taught me how to snowboard at a small resort where they blasted hip-hop onto the slopes, which I attempted to translate through crude gestures. Despite our linguistic limitations, Chikako and I soon recognized that we shared an irreverent sense of humor and that we both liked taking risks. When she informed me that on Wednesdays lift tickets at the ski resort were free for women, I introduced her to the concept of the “sick day.” I’ll never forget picking up the phone one Wednesday morning to hear Chikako say, “I don’t feel so good, and you?”
After a long day of surreptitious snowboarding, we enjoyed a blissful soak at Mawaki Onsen. Following the bath we got akasuri, a form of Korean exfoliation that takes place in a steamy back room where women in black bras and underwear rub you down from head to toe with scouring pads. If this sounds remotely sexy, it’s not. Within minutes, your skin sloughs off in grimy piles, revealing a painfully raw undercoat. But it was fun to lie on a gurney alongside Chikako, two naked pink giants, sharing a joke that needed no translation.
The bathroom of the house that I rented in Japan was extremely unappealing. Mushrooms actually sprouted in the grout. So I usually bathed at the end of the block, at a public bathhouse that had one tub for men and one for women. Divided only by a cloth partition, you could hear chatting from the other side. In the evening, people would walk over from their houses wearing pajamas and carrying plastic tubs of shampoo and razors and soap, and towels slung over their shoulders. While my neighbors and I didn’t always coexist in perfect harmony, I loved participating in this local ritual, sitting at the wall of showers alongside grandmothers giving each other shoulder rubs and mothers scrubbing down their children before bed. I felt accepted, unexceptional in my nudity. Stripped down, we’re all sort of funny-looking and gorgeous, lumpy and perfect, more alike than alien.
“I felt accepted, unexceptional in my nudity. Stripped down, we’re all sort of funny-looking and gorgeous, lumpy and perfect, more alike than alien.”
Read on
Author’s Picks: Favorite Books Set in Japan (plus one movie)
Out, by Natsuo Kirino
It’s ridiculously hard to throw away anything unusual in Japan without attracting attention. When a woman who works the graveyard shift at a bento box lunch plant kills her abusive husband, she enlists the help of three female coworkers to dispose of the body. The ladies almost get away with it. This noir thriller is fascinating for its depiction of the lives of working-class women in contemporary Japan and their uneasy friendships.
The Elephant Vanishes and Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami never gives lengthy setting descriptions, yet Japan is clearly both backdrop and subject of his fiction. His story collection, The Elephant Vanishes, includes “Sleep,” about a housewife who suddenly doesn’t need any. At first it seems like a gift—she stays up all night reading novels—but she soon becomes robotic and disaffected. Murakami always blurs the line between the real and imagined. His novel, Norwegian Wood, is a moving coming-of-age story set in Tokyo at the end of the sixties. The plot is plausible, but it definitely shares the same uncanny sensibility.
Fear and Trembling and Tokyo Fiancée, by Amelie Nothomb
The Belgian author Amelie Nothomb spent her early childhood in Japan, then returned as a young woman. These experiences inspired several short novels. In Fear and Trembling, Amelie goes to work as a corporate translator in Tokyo and enters an almost sadomasochistic relationship with her female supervisor, who demotes her to bathroom janitor to humiliate her. It’s an interesting window into Japanese office life and a fresh take on DeSade. The more recent Tokyo Fiancée describes a perfect yet doomed romantic relationship between Amelie and a young Japanese man.
My Year of Meats, by Ruth Ozeki
The narrator of this hilarious novel is a purple-haired, six-foot-tall Japanese American woman who works for a Japanese reality TV show sponsored by the American beef export lobby. Disgusted to discover the corruption and greed at the heart of the meat industry, she starts filming exposés instead of puff pieces. The book also follows a repressed Japanese housewife moved by the show to transform her life. Ozeki used to work on Japanese reality shows funded by corporate sponsors like Phillip Morris. She has unique insight into Japanese culture, as well as how it feels as an artist to sell out.
The Pillow Book of Lady Sei Shonagon, by Sei Shonagon
Sei Shonagon was a court lady in tenth-century Japan who allegedly received a bunch of notebooks from the empress, which she used to jot down reflections, observations, and lists. Her insights still ring true one thousand years later. Things that give an unclean feeling: the inside of a cat’s ear. Annoying things: thinking of something to add to a letter after having sent it. Embarrassing things: parents cooing over an ugly child. Pleasing things: finding a large number of tales one has not read before or acquiring the second volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed.
“Sei Shonagon was a court lady in tenth-century Japan who allegedly received a bunch of notebooks from the empress, which she used to jot down reflections, observations, and lists. Her insights still ring true one thousand years
later.”
The Pearl Diver, by Jeff Talarigo
When a cut on a pearl diver’s hand fails to heal, she is diagnosed with leprosy and—in keeping with the Japanese laws of the time—her name is expunged from her family registry and she is banished to an island leprosarium. This novel about being shunned manages to be tragic but not grim. Despite her constricted circumstances, the pearl diver finds beauty and creates meaningful relationships. In spare and lovely prose, Talarigo draws a chilling parallel to the treatment in Japan of AIDS patients.
Naomi, by Junichiro Tanizaki
This is Japan’s Lolita, at least in its setup. A man in his thirties can’t stop thinking about a fifteen-year-old girl from a lower socioeconomic class. Motivated by a love of all things “modern” and Western, he persuades her to move in with him in an unconventional arrangement where she will not be subservient in any way. Like Lolita, young Naomi has depths, life experience, and powers of manipulation beyond what her older lover imagines.
Tokyo: A Certain Style, text and photographs by Kyoichi Tsuzuki
The documentary photographer Kyoichi Tsuzuki wanted to document the way people really live in one of the most magical and congested cities on earth. So he got the keys to the apartments of Tokyo-ites from all walks of life and paid surprise visits to photograph the clutter crammed into tiny spaces. Flipping through this book satisfies my curiosity to see into people’s private lives, and makes me feel better about my own messiness.
Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimito
The main character in this strange and sweet novel is a young girl who is all alone in the world until she meets a boy who works at a flower shop and happens to have a transsexual father. Like Murakami, Yoshimoto writes fables set in the here and now.
After Life, a movie directed by Hirokazu Koreeda
Anyone with an interest in Japan is bound to fall in love with this moving, melancholy movie. It opens on a group of people of different ages shuffling into a facility that looks like a Japanese public school. These people have recently died, and they now have one week to choose a single “best memory” from their lives, which the staff at this facility will then recreate on film (using B-movie props like cotton puff clouds) for them to reenter for eternity. After Life is poignantly understated. No one rails against death, even as they quietly grieve what they’ve lost. There are rules even in the afterlife, and for the most part even the dead obey them.
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About the Author
Malena Watrous’s short fiction has appeared in Story Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Triquarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and Kyoto Journal. The winner of the Michener-Copernicus Award, she lives in San Francisco.
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Credits
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photograph of the flowers by Tohoku Color Agency/Getty Images
Cover illustration by Dan-ah Kim
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
IF YOU FOLLOW ME. Copyright © 2010 by Malena Watrous. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.
EPub Edition © January 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-198138-8
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