Cathedrals of the Flesh

by Alexia Brue

  We both looked at Philippe, who had polished off twenty-four pieces of dark chocolate in the Belgian version of reverting to childhood. Mizuo started to work the telephones, and after an alarmingly long string of receptionists saying 'fully booked,' he found a room for me at the Asia Center, a 'business' hotel for people in less than lucrative businesses. At $40 a night, it was the bargain of downtown Tokyo. I was thrilled. I left Philippe and Mizuo to talk ant canvases and Warhol values. Philippe invited me to dinner the following night.

  My digs at the Asia Center had a desk, a narrow cot, and a coin-operated television set. Down the hall was a communal bathroom with a shower stall that also doubled as a mop closet. Must find sento, I thought with a desperation compounded by jet lag. Sentos are city bathhouses - places for long, languid soaks with other neighborhood women. I assumed sentos would be so prevalent in Tokyo that I'd have literally a dozen to choose from on any given street. I found the receptionist downstairs and pointed to the sento listings in my guidebook. 'Please help me find sento?' I implored.

  'Hmmm, I don't live around here,' the young man at the desk said apologetically. 'There are sentos everywhere. . . .' He scratched his cheek, looking toward the ceiling for divine inspiration. If you ask a Japanese person for directions, he or she will, as a cultural point of pride, try to help, until you realize that they are looking at the map upside down and, in fact, aren't even from the city you're lost in. You have to bow out, literally bend at the waist, and absolve them of responsibility before they'll leave you to fend for yourself on the convoluted, unmarked streets of Japan. But I waited out the confusion and got some inspired advice.

  The receptionist said, 'Maybe good idea to go to Asakusa. Asakusa is still like an old Edo village with Shitamachi spirit.' I nodded in false comprehension. Edo, I remembered, was the old name for Tokyo when it was just a collection of small fishing villages clustered along Tokyo Bay. But I knew not of Shitamachi. It sounded like a fake Japanese word that Western kids might make up in the playground: 'You big Shitamachi, give me back my Pokemon card.'

  Shitamachi, as it turns out, refers to the low-lying plain of Tokyo that was traditionally less affluent and more villagelike than the tonier area of Yamanote, the uptown. Artisans and craftspeople gravitated toward Shitamachi, and the communal, salt-of-the-earth ethos continues uninterrupted today. So pleasing was it phonetically that I started incorporating Shitamachi into as many conversations as I could, and indeed, it's one of those insider words that Japanese people are flattered and surprised you've learned. How does one get to Shitamachi? Well, you can take a train there.

  Walking on the streets of a large Japanese city, like Tokyo or Kyoto, is a uniquely alienating experience. Street drama does not unfold with the same spontaneous electricity with which New York's soul bursts forth from every hot dog stand and overheard cell phone conversation. The Japanese scuffle along briskly, eyes to the pavement or glued to their DoCoMo phone interface (they read from their phones more than they speak into them), as they rush between work and home. The women totter along chicly in elevator heels (now illegal to drive in after a spate of fatal traffic accidents when a five-inch shoe sole prevented the driver from moving her foot from the gas to the brake in a timely fashion); the men clutch briefcases, looking weary and embattled; and the young kids, resembling junior naval officers in their school uniforms, move in amoebic hordes. Everywhere there are people, but there's no interaction. As one longtime expat described it to me: Japanese people operate on an AM frequency and Americans on FM. Different decibels of existence.

  Don't these people talk and laugh and shout and get rowdy? It's so unlike the one thousand little dramas unfolding daily on the streets of any American city, where men and women jostle and bump up against one another, homeless people have tantrums, construction workers make lewd comments, and everyone is eyeing everyone else for better clothes and smaller cell phones. In Japan, the street dynamics operate on a barely audible frequency, and in a country where I don't speak the language this makes me feel invisible, alone, and, most of all, in need of a bath. Where else would one go to see the Japanese at their most animated?

  Tokyo does not look the way it's supposed to. I expected small winding alleys of craftspeople making kimonos and tatami mats, brewers of saki, culturers of tofu. Where were the dark wooden buildings with lanterns out front? The rows of machiyas, elegant traditional town houses, with nearby teahouses and rock gardens? All the fairy-tale aspects of a traditional Japan were conspicuously absent. Tokyo today, with the exception of small Shitamachi pockets, is a blinking neon light illuminating high-rise office buildings in an endless sea of convenience stores. The ultramodernity is not so surprising when you consider that Tokyo's been leveled twice in the twentieth century: once by the great Kanto earthquake in 1923 and a second time by aerial bombing during World War II.

  Ueno and Asakusa are the last two stops on the Ginza line, Tokyo's oldest subway line. On a crisp late September evening, I disembarked at Ueno, an eastern subcenter. The train station was in the middle of a huge shopping arcade, the funky, junk-filled Ameya-yokocho Arcade. There were stalls selling mysterious oils and unguents, a man hawking huge bins of socks, and vendors of dangerous-looking yakitori skewers. I stood in the middle of a sea of intersections — blinking lights and beeping crosswalks — with no clue in which direction to head. I popped another jet-lag relief pill.

  I was looking for Rokuryu, a sento-style bath with onsen waters, a rarity in Tokyo. I didn't have the exact address, but my Japanese onsen bible suggested that Rokuryu was hard to miss: in back of the Ueno Zoo, left at a noodle shop, and down a small lane. Child's play. Unfortunately, I am cursed with no internal compass, and I would spend almost as much time in Japan searching for baths as I would spend in them.

  It took only five minutes to find the enormous leafy park known as Ueno-Koen (Ueno Hill), filled with every distraction from teahouses to ice-cream stands to museums of modern art, eastern antiquities, and science. Two hours, three miles of walking, and eight direction givers later, I found the white-tiled facade and cloth banners, called noren, of Rokuryu.

  Out front there were lockers shaped like shoeboxes. In Japan, shoes are a scourge, a vile contagion, lumped in the same category as hypodermic needles. I slipped my shoes in the box and shut it, and a clunky wooden chip with grooves popped out. My key. Nearby, in the digital enclave of Akihabara, where skyscraper after skyscraper is a megastore shrine to gadgets that store media in bytes and bits, this stone age key would be looked upon with derision.

  There were two doors into the sento. One would lead to a room crowded with naked men scratching themselves (or so I imagined), the other to a more sisterly realm of bathing goddesses. I opened my onsen bible in an attempt to identify the hiragana characters for male and female. Before I had time to distinguish otokoburo (bath for men) from onnaburo (bath for women), a young woman pedaled up to Rokuryu with a bundled-up child on her backseat, removed their shoes (even though the child couldn't walk, good habits start early), and chose the door on the right. I followed.

  Before entering a sento dressing room, there is always a bandai-san to contend with. Traditionally the bandai-san, who can be either a man or a woman, sits impassively on a raised platform overlooking both the men's and women's sides. The bandai-san s job is to collect the small entry fee, usually $3 or $4, and to sell soaps, shampoos, and towels. For regulars, the bandai-san might tell them who's inside and fill them in on local gossip. Newer sentos often place the bandai-san in an outer lobby, like a hotel concierge. It seems customers, especially younger women, don't like bandai-sans of the opposite sex having a bird's-eye view into the dressing room. It's a eunuch's job.

  I handed the bandai-san a 500-yen note (roughly $4) and pointed to one of the hand towels for sale, a tenugui. Sento regulars arrive with their own furoshiki, an all-purpose square cloth for carrying the necessary bath ointments, brushes, and loofahs. The furoshiki can also be used inside the bath for covering up if a bandai-san s
gaze turns lecherous.

  'Onsen?' I asked.

  'Hai, onsen,' replied the male bandai-san, followed by a long explanation of I don't know what: the mineral content of the baths, the hours of operation, how foreigners weren't allowed. Foreigners, or gaijin, as the Japanese refer to all non-Japanese, are still sometimes turned away from onsen in the northern province of Hokkaido, but in cosmopolitan Tokyo this kind of gaijin prejudice is no longer prevalent.

  I stripped to nothing, even removing my earrings (onsen water can tarnish), and placed all my belongings into a straw bucket that slid neatly into a locker. The design utility of the Japanese was matched only by the Finns, I thought. I looked at all the naked Japanese women, both dressing and undressing around me, and in the presence of their flowerlike bodies I felt as three-dimensional and relentlessly curvy as a helium balloon figurine, like the pictures Picasso painted of rotund, billowy female figures overtaking the canvas. All the Japanese women had delicate frames, with breasts that swelled but weren't big enough to sag, narrow shoulders, and flat bottoms.

  Japanese women are far too polite and discreet to stare at another person's physical differences, but my fleshiness and comparative corpulence would, I was sure, turn into an 'Amazon gaijin at the sento' story later that night. I tried to pretend I was still in a Finnish sauna surrounded by lumpy, pear-shaped bodies. A scenario where I was the relative flower. But I noticed one thing Finnish and Japanese women had in common: the unruliness of their pubic hair. It was only the Slavs who waged a war of hot wax on their hair follicles.

  I slid back the water-streaked glass door and tiptoed barefoot into the hot and steamy sento room. It was a high-ceilinged, light-flooded room with blue metal rafters and a twenty-foot partition separating the men's and women's sides. I didn't hear much noise coming from the men's side. From the women's side there was a cacophony of babies gurgling, women laughing, and, predominantly, water flowing.

  All the women in the bathing room stopped what they were doing to look at me. What was a gaijin doing at their local sento? The innocent question etched across their quizzical, knitted eyebrows. A couple of them smiled and nodded at me in welcoming recognition, and then they went back to scrubbing and soaking. This was pretense, though. Really they were watching my every move to make sure that I cleaned myself properly.

  A tub in Japan is not where you clean yourself, it is where you go after you are thoroughly cleaned, sterilized, a germ-neutral expanse of epidermis. I wanted to impress my fellow bathers with my mastery of this concept. I wanted to give them a story of the gaijin with scrupulous hygiene so that night over their dinner of shabu-shabu they could say, 'Americans are much cleaner than we thought. Today I saw a giant American girl clean herself for fifteen minutes before getting into the water.' before getting into the water.'

  Along both walls were rows of showers. Unlike showers in the West — the high-water-pressure nozzles that you stand underneath as hot water cascades down your shoulders and washes the shampoo from your hair — Japanese showers jut out of the wall at hip level, reminding me of so-called hip baths of the ancient Greek gymnasia.

  I scanned the humid, soap-scented room for instruction and inspiration. The idea, it seemed, was to pull a stool up to the nozzle and scrub yourself silly. Some of the older women forwent the stools and sat on their haunches directly on the floor, just as I'd seen in eighteenth-century Japanese woodblocks. I watched the woman and child who had come in before me head over to an empty stool, pour soap on the stool, scrub for ten seconds, and then wash it off with cold water. Now it was clean enough to sit on. She followed the same procedure with one of the small pink buckets, washing it and then using it to douse herself with water. I was teaching myself the ritual.

  I chose the vacant shower stool next to her. There was a mirror directly in front of me, and I examined my face, colorless and waxy, and my body, jet-lagged and bloated. I pictured Charles moving out of our New York apartment. I couldn't imagine life without him, my best friend. Making hot chocolate thick as souffle on winter nights, lazy Sundays leafing through photo books, our constant comforting phone calls. I felt very alone imagining a life without these shared joys. Yet as much as we would miss each other, we both knew that a life together would be based on tacit disappointment. Then, inexplicably, I wondered what Philippe was doing across town. Was there anything wrong with accepting his invitation for dinner? Shouldn't I be contemplating my solo life, getting to know myself again, reading self-help books and following twelve steps to something? I turned on the handheld shower and set to work cleaning myself in an ablution of guilt.

  I noticed that the older ladies didn't use the shower head (too modern!) and instead just filled and refilled their small buckets, pouring a constant stream of water over themselves. The lady next to me had taken a cloth and begun what was to be a fifteen-minute process of soaping herself from head to toe, in between every fold of skin. I mimed her exactly. She rubbed in circles at the nape of her neck, and so did I. Underneath the armpits, down the torso, inside the belly button, a thorough attack on the groin, a careful tiptoe across the shanks and calves, and in between every toe. Then she bucketed off all the soap, and I watched it flow down the drain in foamy snakes. I repeated this elaborate process while she was washing her child, who had turned a shade of pink in the heat of the room. I looked around, hoping to collect impressed, approving nods. I was the cleanest gaijin in Tokyo. That I was certain of.

  Now I just had to choose a tub to soak in. I was overwhelmed the same way I was at the Finnish Sauna Society. There were two tiled tubs of hot water in the middle of the room that looked enticing. More intriguing, however, were the two larger tubs in the back of the room, filled with mysterious black water.

  I chose the onsen water, the color of grape soda. It was hot, about 105 degrees Fahrenheit. I know water temperatures like a wine connoisseur knows grape varietals. This water was almost first-degree-burn hot. All around me sat Japanese women with expressions of utter contentment and contemplation. How did they summon such serenity inside a lobster pot? Didn't they know we would die if we stayed in too long? I wanted to warn them, but I didn't know how. Then I remembered an expression from the onsen bible: Atsui desu.' (It's hot!)

  'Hai, hai, hai,' said an older woman next to me, laughing.

  A woman closer to my age, sitting in the adjacent tub, whispered, 'It is a little cooler in this tub.' I crossed the divide. I wouldn't exactly say it was a relief, but the water was slightly more tolerable.

  'Arigato gozaimasu,' I said, a polite form of'thank you' in Japanese.

  'You like onsen?' she asked in a soft, willowy voice. Her accent sounded almost British.

  'You speak English?'

  'Yes, I spent many years abroad with my husband. He works for a plastics company and we lived in London. Is this the first onsen you visit?'

  'Yes, my very first. I thought onsen were for long soaks. Are all onsen this hot?' Next to me I noticed a woman in her seventies, hair wrapped carefully in layers of diaphanous hairnets, easing into the hotter tub and placing a small sand dial next to her. She was going to measure her soak in grains of sand.

  'This onsen is special for Eddoko. In this part of Tokyo, Shita­machi, we take bath extra hot. Oh, forgive my rudeness, my name is Ayako. What is yours?'

  'Alexia. It's very nice to meet you. I've only been in Tokyo for two days, but I am realizing how rare it is to meet someone who speaks fluent English.'

  'Yes, it's a problem. We learn it in school so everyone can read English, but the schools don't teach how to speak it, and of course Japanese people are very shy to do anything that they cannot do perfectly.' That explained a lot. Meanwhile I watched incredulously as the woman I'd come in with dunked her one-year-old baby. I expected cries, but instead he cooed in delight and splashed around in the black water.

  'Ayako, why is this water the color of grape soda?'

  'Yes, it is unusual. This used to be just a normal city sento, or so the story goes, but the water bills
were making the owner poor, so he began to drill for natural onsen water. Everyone thought it was silly, especially in Tokyo, since there is not much onsen water here, but at five hundred meters he hit this black water. At first he thought it was useless because it's not the normal color for onsen water. But then he had it analyzed and found that it has thirteen different minerals and cures everything from rheumatism to heat rash to obesity. Now he is a very rich man.'

  'So hitting onsen water is like striking oil.'

  'Maybe,' she said, contemplating my sensationalist analogy.

  Ayako and I were both feeling light-headed and drugged. We wandered over to the showers to cool off.

  'Are you a regular here?' I asked as we both threw buckets of cold water over our shoulders.

  'I live uptown, but my mother lives in Asakusa, so when I visit her I sometimes stop here to enjoy the water. It gives me energy.'

  'Are there many wonderful sentos to visit in Tokyo?'

  'The old neighborhoods still have traditional sentos, though many have closed down or modernized, adding a gym facility or a karaoke room. If you want to visit a place where sentos are still a big part of life, you must go to Kyoto. Kyoto is a more traditional, spiritual city.'

  'How so?'

  'We have a popular joke that shows the difference,' she began. 'Imagine a huge temple made of solid gold. It is a beautiful place, and there are many tourists inside. The tourist from Tokyo wonders how the temple was constructed, who designed it, and when it was built. The tourist from Osaka tries to calculate how much money the gold is worth . . .' She paused for effect. 'And the tourist from Kyoto just worships.'