Cathedrals of the Flesh

by Alexia Brue

  We sat in worshipful silence for a few minutes. I noticed an official notarized document framed on the wall. The Onsen Association, which categorizes all the types of thermal waters in Japan, had classified Rokuryu as 'sodium hydrogen-carbonate' water. Onsen authentication is serious business. Onsen owners must disclose the exact temperature of the water when it comes out of the ground, how much it is heated, and whether or not they add any minerals to the yu (hot water). Some sentos, in order to market themselves, boast 'onsen' baths where they add special mineral salts to the bath. Indeed, these kinds of bath salts are popular all over Japan, Ayako explained as we slipped into another, smaller tub with cooler, clear water.

  'At night I will ask my husband if he wants Beppu, Atami, or Nagano bath,' she said, naming three of the premier onsen destinations.

  'Oh, so you have bath salts from each of those places?'

  'Yes, you can buy these salts in Tokyo or when you visit onsen in other cities.'

  'So after this bath you will go home and fix your husband a bath?'

  'Yes,' she answered shyly.

  'Japanese women prepare baths for their husbands?' I asked, struggling with this concept.

  'Yes, every night. He's out working, and I'm a lazy housewife.' She laughed innocently.

  'Do you want to work?'

  'Not really. You see, I am of a strange, in-between generation. My younger sister works, and she lives at home. She doesn't really want to get married and take care of a man.'

  I had read about this phenomenon of young Japanese women who live at home well into their twenties and thirties. The Japanese even coined a special name for this large demographic group, which translates as 'parasite singles.' Because they live at home, housed and fed by their parents, virtually all their income is disposable, and they almost single-handedly keep Louis Vuitton and Michael Kors in business. This generation of women consciously resists marriage and all its inherent sacrifices and caretaking responsibilities in Japanese society.

  Ayako continued, 'But I was never raised to work. I was raised to get married. When I was twenty-two the matchmaker began to set up meetings for me and my husband. He was my second meeting, but he had met over seventy girls before me. When I was your age it was considered very bad if you weren't married by twenty-five. An unmarried woman over twenty-five was called "Christmas cake the day after Christmas."'

  I leaned my head back in the tub and wondered if there were Japanese translations of Gloria Steinem. I tried to imagine Marina or myself as dutiful wives drawing baths for our husbands. No, we'd have a hamam to wash strangers, but our husbands would be on their own.

  'Ayako, do you have a favorite onsen?' I asked, changing the subject.

  After some deliberation, she revealed: 'It is a place high in the Gumma mountains, very remote, very obscure, called Takaragawa.'

  'Takaragawa! That is Mr Miyake's favorite onsen also.'

  'Mr. Miyake?'

  'The only other Japanese person I know.'

  That reminded me: they were picking me up for dinner in an hour and a half, and a confusing subway ride still lay between me and the Asia Center. So after soaking for an hour with Ayako, we exchanged phone numbers, agreeing to visit another Tokyo sento together and maybe do some shopping in Ginza. She was delightful, and her fluent English was a gift from the gods.

  At 8:00 on the dot, a minivan of art dealers came to collect me at the Asia Center. It was a veritable UN of aesthetes - a Japanese, a South American, a Frenchman, and a Belgian; I was the token American and girl. Most of us were too jet-lagged to have a conversation any more sophisticated than an ongoing stream of Belgian jokes. Max, an Argentinean, and Philippe's best friend, began with, 'Let me present the attributes of a modern European. He combines the moral courage of the French, the fighting spirit of the Italians, the work ethic of the British, and the sense of humor of the Germans. In short, a Belgian.' Philippe rolled his eyes and put his arm around me.

  We arrived in good spirits at Fuku-sushi, a fashionable Rappongi sushi restaurant with gleaming navy tables and lavender accent lights. As we entered the dining room, we were greeted by a deafening chorus of 'Irashaimase!' from the five sushi chefs behind the long counter. Irashaimase means roughly 'Welcome,' and the louder it is said, the greater the sign of respect. Since Mizuo was a regular at Fuku-sushi, we got the high-decibel Broadway version. A lacquered tray of sushi arrived: an enormous assortment of buttery pieces of fish, teriyaki eel, heaps of salty red caviar, and foamy sea urchin atop small lumps of lightly vinegared rice. No California rolls or crabstick rolls - in fact, no rolls at all. Just huge pieces of the freshest catch from Tsukiji, the world's largest fish market.

  With his round, dimpled face and gentle, questioning blue eyes, Max looked like a Buddhist monk in an Italian suit. Max had lived and worked in Tokyo for eight years and had become as assimilated as a foreigner in Japan is allowed. As Donald Richie, the foremost writer on postwar Japan, pointed out, 'Shortly, however, the visitor discovered that Japan insisted that he keep his distance . . . though he desired intimacy, Japan was gently teaching him to keep his distance.' This ultimately was Max's experience. Though he spoke nearly flawless Japanese, understood and abided by all Japanese proclivities, and had visited the sento every evening when he lived in a six-tatami room in Tokyo, he would always be a gaijin.

  'I had a tiny apartment, and if I took a bath at home, I'd have to sit like this,' he explained, pulling his legs tightly to his chest in demonstration. 'So every night I went to the sento with friends, and of course I made sento friends as well. At the sento you can see all the yakuzi, the Mafia guys, who are covered from head to toe in the most insane tattoos.'

  'The Japanese are very romantic about baths,' I mused.

  'Yes, very much so. The Japanese still romanticize the furo of old, the tub made out of hinoki wood, a fragrant wood considered sacred. I guess it's cedar in English. And of course the Japanese never varnish everything. Don't mess with nature. So the tubs become silky to touch when the wood ages.'

  'And what's this thing called skinship?' I asked.

  'Ahh.' Max smiled and took another sip of sake. 'That's a more metaphorical romanticism about the baths. There's an expression, Hadaka no tsukiai, which means "Companions in nudity" or "Naked association." The idea is that by sharing the same bath and bathwater, you do away with all the normal social barriers in life and can forge closer bonds. Occasionally I also hear the expression "Bath friends are best friends," and it's true that the atmosphere of the bath makes possible a closeness rarely experienced otherwise in Japanese life.'

  As it turned out, locating old, traditional sentos involved hours of sleuthing — looking for clues like tall, slender chimneys, asking for directions, and waiting for twenty minutes while an old woman with no vocal cords lovingly drew a detailed map of Kita-ku, a rough Tokyo suburb. Sentos, I was discovering, are the poor cousins of onsen, using normal tap water instead of mineral-infused curative water, serving city dwellers in need of a bath instead of vacationers in search of a soak. The sento, once a vital urban institution, today fumbles for respectability and survival, but still I searched daily for still-functioning reincarnations of the rowdy Edo period sentos.

  I quickly found that the sentos in Tokyo's outer suburbs were best, but Kyoto was continually invoked as the place to experience old-fashioned sento life. Kyoto apartments and machiyas were still small and cramped and lacked adequate plumbing such that many Kyotoites visited the sento for their nightly bath.

  So I made a plan. Rather than risk disappointment at another Tokyo sento with recently installed karaoke bar or gym wing (blasphemy!), I decided to cut my losses, activate my J&R rail pass, and check out Hakone before setting off for Kyoto.

  Only one hundred kilometers away, Hakone is Tokyo's not-so-secret garden and most convenient onsen getaway. Mt Fuji, or Fujisan, as the Japanese affectionately refer to their highest peak, is visible on a clear day, furthering Hakone's appeal. Despite the crowds that Hakone draws, it was a huge
relief to let down my city guard, to smell the azaleas, see mountainsides of trees, and adopt a more provincial pace.

  I expected a single Hakone train stop, with a Hobbit-style signpost directing bath-seeking Bilbos to one of the town's spectacular onsen — a straightforward system with painted wood postings that read, 'Backaches this way,' 'Depression and anemia that way.' But Hakone was a sprawling destination, dotting several mountain ridges and running for several train stops. I got off at Hakone-Yumoto, the most popular stop, and walked two miles up the side of a mountain to the Tenzan onsen.

  The Tenzan-noten-buro is the bath junkie's ultimate pleasure complex, surrounded by bamboo groves and pine trees. Inside the dark-wooded tatami wonderland, I unlaced my shoes for the eight hundredth time, cursing myself for not bringing slip-ons to Japan. The bath fee, even at a place as remote and upscale as this onsen, was still under $8. I wanted to wander around, exploring the tatami recesses of the long passages and hidden alcoves, but the Japanese are helpful to a fault, and I was whisked straight back to the women's onsen area, bypassing the massage area, cafés, a mysterious room of sleeping bodies, and what I like to imagine was an opium den but was probably just a VIP lounge for tea ceremonies.

  Again I found myself in a changing room, taking off my clothes in front of strangers, wondering how this mountainside onsen would compare to the Tokyo sentos. The shower room, a wooden, steamy-windowed cube, had not one synthetic object. The stools, the shelves, and the buckets for washing were all constructed of light, fragrant cedar. The foggy windows peered out onto the most enchanting and aesthetically perfect bath scene I'd encountered. The Japanese, I was realizing, possessed the rare ability to improve on nature. The outdoor pavilion of four hot pools was fenced off from the men's side by a thick grove of six-foot green bamboo stalks. The rock-hewn pools, shaped like amorphously floating continents, boasted sodium chloride thermal water, which is said to cure every conceivable malady. This water inspired sixteenth-century Edo dwellers to walk for three days straight, over fifty miles along the Tokaido Road, to soak in Hakone's pools. Even early visitors from France, where water has never been trusted, got over their fears in the late nineteenth century and discovered the pleasures of onsen bathing in Hakone-Yumoto.

  I stood on the slated walkway, cataloging all the pools, one with a straw pagoda, another that recessed into a cave, a third with a small Buddha shrine at the far end. The women looked young, beautiful, and immortally vital with their flushed onsen complexions. Many carried young children. Everyone looked grateful to be here in this bathing garden, far from Tokyo, if only mentally. I chose the pool with the Buddha statue, and immediately a group of teenage girls started to chat me up. They began with a school-scripted dialogue that, after a week in Japan, I'd performed at least twenty times.

  'Where . . . are . . . you . . . from?' they summoned slowly.

  'New York City,' I replied, and enjoyed the usual ohhs and ahhs that pronouncing New York City your hometown garners abroad. It's an instant passport to rock star status.

  One of the girls told me, 'This water is the most original in this pool,' which I took to mean was most direct from the subterranean source. They splashed the water onto their faces, and I followed. Their serene happiness was infectious, and the thought that hot spring bathing constituted a major girls outing thrilled me.

  After my delightfully natural Hakone bathing experience, I set out for what I knew would be a ghastly curiosity. I walked another three miles along a highway in search of Yunessun, a newly opened theme park devoted to bathing. I was simultaneously sickened and awed by this uniquely Japanese brand of genius kitsch - the synthetic, Formica version of the Turkish hamam and the prefab, 'decaying' Ionic columns and urns surrounding the Roman bath. If four thousand people a day traipsed through this tacky Epcot Center of bathing cultures, then surely Marina and I would attract a stampede of visitors to our impeccably tasteful establishment.

  While I did this, Philippe did whatever art dealers do - inspect paintings, seduce prospective buyers, drink Champagne. Despite Philippe's lack of depth and genuine understanding, his sense of humor and playfulness made him compelling. He was the perfect antidote to heartbreak, if a slightly guilty one. When he suggested that we visit Takaragawa together, the onsen that Mizuo and Ayako had both mentioned, I balked at first. Of course, nothing sounded more enjoyable than to soak with an attractive man in a mountainside rotenburo. But nice people don't run off with Belgian art dealers days after a breakup.

  Throughout our two-day excursion, Philippe and I made enough gaijin gaffes to keep area sushi bar conversations humming for weeks. Philippe had told me on the plane that he was 'proficient in Japanese.' To me, 'proficient' means you can decode directions and engage in cursory chitchat, but you can't tell a joke or discuss literature. Proficient obviously meant something else entirely to Philippe. When left to our own devices, without Max or Mizuo to translate, Philippe could barely ask for a glass of water.

  It took us over an hour of involved pantomime and phrase book pointing to check into the Takaragawa ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn deep in the Gumma mountains, where the jagged peaks were shaped like Egyptian pyramids. Upon arrival, we had been shoved into the gaijin hotel. Whereas hundreds of Japanese people were at the inn down the road, wearing enviable rough cotton brown robes, we were the only guests at our hotel and stuck with prissy blue silk robes to boot.

  Mikono Ono, the proprietor with four missing front teeth, did the ryokan song and dance, explaining the many features of the room, except perhaps the most important one - that inside the quaint-looking bathroom was a toilet capable of physical assault. Innocently, you might press a button hoping to flush the toilet, and the next second a stealthy projectile instrument emerges from the back of the bowl and with dead-on accuracy sprays warm water up your bottom. We would learn that later; now we learned about the exhausting choreography of slipper changing. Here's a summary:

  When you arrive at the ryokan, leave your contaminated street shoes at the front door and put on special corridor-roaming slippers. At the entrance of your bedroom, remove dirty corridor-roaming slippers. Walk on the tatami-matted floor with stockinged feet (bare feet only if you must). If you go to the bathroom, make sure to put on the special bathroom slippers, marked 'toilet' on the toe and found by the bathroom door. After you flush — with a possible hose-down by the electronic proctologist — make sure to remove the bathroom slippers. Walking around in slippers marked 'toilet' is the ultimate gaijin faux pas. If you decide to stroll in the garden, you must again don dirty corridor-roaming slippers; by the door of the garden, you'll see a supply of dirtier, nastier garden slippers. A good rule of thumb: If you haven't changed footwear in over fifteen paces, you've done something horribly wrong.

  We dressed carefully. I introduced Philippe to the essential leisurewear of any onsen stay. The yukata is a loose-fitting, wide-sleeved cotton robe. Kata means garment and yu hot water; thus yukata is the garment designed for strolling to and from the baths. More problematic are the geta, wooden clogs commonly worn at hot spring towns that force all wearers, from children to sumo wrestlers, to shuffle along like delicate geisha.

  We stumbled through an outdoor bamboo tunnel lit by kerosene and filled with stalls selling a bizarre bric-a-brac of Buddhist statues, plastic action figures, stuffed animals, and incense sticks. After the wares, we passed a temple precinct, an alcove for zazen, silent meditation. We peered into the cages of brown bears and finally emerged into the open autumn air, the fiery-leafed maples bending toward the rocky valley of rotenburo, as if to listen to the water. The crisp October wind rustled the leaves and shook the branches, muting the sound of the water. A fifty-foot bamboo pipe stretched from the mountainside where we stood down into the bath, delivering hot water.

  This incredible natural beauty is considered sacred in Japan's Shinto culture. I knew the onsen had religious origins; almost all of Japan's hot springs were originally founded by Buddhist monks wandering through the wilderness on
forty-day fasts. During the Tumulus period, many Shinto shrines were built next to hot springs. Takaragawa looked like one of those shrines, the straw-thatched pagoda covering part of the enormous, amoeba-shaped pool, the stone lanterns, so common at shrines, set up like an altar at one corner of the pool, a stone-sculpted Buddha presiding over another corner. It was a glorious scene. I admired the baths, registered the many people soaking in the pool, but in my eagerness to get out of the cool air and into the hot water, I didn't observe as much as I should have.

  Philippe and I each disappeared into our separate changing rooms, agreeing to meet naked outside in a moment. Bath nudity never causes as much anxiety as bedroom nudity, at least not for me. This main rotenburo at Takaragawa was reputed to be one of the few mixed-gender baths in the country, and Mikono Ono had vouched for that, too. All Japanese baths used to be mixed gender until Commodore Perry arrived in 1853 and was so scandalized by the sight of men and women bathing together that he forced the new Meiji government to segregate the baths according to Western Victorian standards of morality. (This is the story, but the actual history is more complicated.)

  Because I thought myself to be at a mixed bath, I left the dressing room carrying only the furoshiki, the small square cloth ten inches by ten inches. I stood at the steps of the red-stone rotenburo, surveying the other bathers. Everyone was studiously not looking at me. Not only was I the only gaijin woman, which would have been distinction enough, but I realized in a sudden, horrifying flash that I was the only naked woman. All the Japanese women had wrapped huge beach towels around their bodies, hiding everything in between their shoulders and midthighs. Philippe came out of his dressing room and stood next to me. It took him a moment to register that one of these things was not like the other. He could easily do what all the Japanese men did - delicately place the washcloth over his groin. For me, however, there was no hope. What should I even try to cover with the tiny cloth? Summoning inner reserves of poise — and there wasn't much to draw from — I quickly and deliberately descended the steps into the bath. One hundred pairs of eyes pretended not to watch me. Philippe was in hysterics.