Cathedrals of the Flesh (20 page)

These two northern countries, Russia and Finland, belonged to the same school of bathing, the
shvitzers,
as I like to think of them. For purposes of categorization, the Turks are steamers and the Japanese soakers. But despite the
fact that the Russians and Finns take joy in sweating in absurdly hot wooden rooms and then plunging into icy water, they
know little about each other's traditions. The Russians and the Finns both regard their bathing traditions with a sense of
nationalistic pride that precludes them from recognizing that their historic enemy has almost identical habits. Subtle differences
have emerged. I'd learned that in a sauna there are no leaves strewn blizzardlike on the floor, no oils or eucalyptus unguents
allowed to touch the sacred sauna rocks. The sauna is an upstanding citizen, a bath whose complexity lies in its guarded purity;
the banya is an enfant terrible inhabited by witches and goblins and all manner of eccentric behavior.

I wondered if Charles was enjoying himself in the other savu­sauna. If anyone was good at bringing people out, it was Charles.
His extroversion topped the charts, and the only people who weren't drawn into conversation with Charles generally couldn't
speak English. Gregarious chitchat came as naturally as breathing to Charles. Maybe the party was happening on the men's side.

The group today seemed to be treating the sauna as an endurance sport, and I was reminded of Tahko Pihkala's dream that someday
saunaing would become an Olympic event. Though this never happened, the sauna did make a profound international debut at the
1924 Paris Olympics, when the Finnish contingent had a model sauna built using special wood imported from Hyvinkää. Admitting
to myself that I had been outsaunaed after two hours, I hit the buffet bar and found that Charles had thrown in his vasta
a half hour earlier.

'So, did you make any friends?' I asked.

'No. These people don't talk,' he said, baffled. 'They'll talk about saunas until you drown them out by whipping yourself
loudly with the vasta, but any efforts at real conversation failed utterly.'

I was relieved. If I'd found Charles joking around with his new circle of Finnish friends, I would have felt like a social
failure. But the Finns were impenetrable for him, too.

Back in the States, Charles and I no longer had the adventure of travel to distract us. Charles's bag never came and, despite
our dogged efforts, was never found. Inside were thousands of pictures capturing our time in Finland, idealized images to
cast a halo over every rainy day, petty frustration, or stupid argument. The missing photos seemed ominous. All our happy
memories were gone.

But, really, who were we kidding? We were no more a perfect couple than Finland was a perfect country. Everything perfect
and harmonious on the outside, and underneath the calm veneer, well, who knew? Why scratch beneath a placid surface? Yet it's
hard to live life commenting on how nice everything looks, how good everything tastes, how wonderful every experience is,
and never get to the heart of the matter - even if I don't really know what the heart of the matter means. All I knew was
that I ached for something more than what Charles and I had. We began to say our good-byes.

japan:

the story of yu

Cleanliness is one of the few original items of Japanese civilisation . . . the bathers stay in the water for a month on end,
with a stone on their lap to prevent them from floating in their sleep.

— Basil Hall Chamberlain,
Things Japanese
(1890)

After four weeks in uninspiring Saunatopia, I still felt that my exploration was unfinished. I hadn't fulfilled the promise
I'd made to myself the previous spring in Turkey - that I would visit all the great bathing cultures of the world. I had visited
the steamers and the sweaters, and I had wandered through the ruins of the greatest bathing culture the world has ever known,
but I hadn't visited the soakers.

Even my optimistic expectations did not prepare me for the bathing fervor that awaited. Japan, the land of the rising sun,
is also the land of ten thousand hot springs. From what I'd heard, every square mile of Japan's volcanic archipelago offered
up a hot spring resort more delightful than the last. A fanaticism and a huge industry curative baths.

Besides my curiosity, personal circumstances pushed me on. After two years, Charles and I called it quits. We had reached
that point when you spend all your time talking about 'the relationship' and cease actually to have one. No matter how much
we cared about each other, there was something missing that not even all the good will in the world could cover up. I wanted
to muffle the sadness and patch over my loneliness in one final adventure.

Marina, who approved of all extravagant ventures related to world travel, registered one reservation. On a phone call from
London she said, 'Alexia, remember we are opening a hamam. I'm worried that you're going to come back, your head filled with
onsen, and want to start changing everything around. We're opening an alabaster hamam, got it?' she said with mock bossiness.
'Oh, and e-mail me if you spot any deals on Issey Miyake.'

'Issey who?'

'You know. The Japanese designer who makes clothes with tiny pleats.'

I chalked this up as another manifestation of Marina's textile obsession but added Issey Miyake to the growing list of things
to check out in Japan. I packed a tiny suitcase just as Marina would have and left without looking over my shoulder at all
the wreckage in my life.

I wasn't dreading the fifteen-hour nonstop plane ride so much as anticipating a catered study hall. In my yellow bag was a
small library of books about Japanese bathing: a lavish coffee table book called
Euro,
a slim, information-packed paperback entitled
Japan: A View
from the Bath,
and two guidebooks to the hot springs. By the time I got off the plane at Narita, I'd be a leading expert on Japanese bathing.

I chose an unassigned bulkhead seat. The blond man two seats away looked over and smiled, then went back to reading
Artforum.
I pulled out
Japan: A Viewfrom the Bath,
ready for a page turner. And it was. I started taking notes:

'Yu' is the kanji symbol (Kanji symbols are the ancient Chinese pictograms that the Japanese language borrowed) for hot water
and all its attendant mysticism. Bathing was not a matter of sitting in a tub with water up to your chest. No, there were
hundreds of permutations such as the steam bath
(mushiyu),
the sand bath
(sunayu),
the electric bath
(denkifuro)
and the natural outdoor soaking bath
(rotenburo).

'Well, it looks like we made it,' whispered my seatmate conspiratorially across the two empty seats.

'What?' I looked up from my reading. I had just penciled a large question mark next to 'electric bath.'

'They've closed the doors. We get to keep our seats.'

'You weren't assigned here, either?'

'No, and I'm six-four, so the regular seats are
unbearable'

I recognized his accent immediately. It was Belgian, very much like a French accent, only harsher, with some added phlegm.
He spoke and looked a lot like the only other Belgian person I knew.

'You're a French-speaking Belgian, right, a Walloon?'

'Very good, Henry Higgins.'

I returned to my book, embarrassed by my show-off remark and impressed that a Belgian knew
Pygmalion.

To
is another word for hot water and
Sen
means money. So it follows that a
sento
is a place where you pay money for hot water. Sentos, public baths with regular tap water, were popular in the cities. Sento
culture was once as socially vibrant as the coffeehouses of Europe. In the 1975 there were 2,163 sentos in Tokyo; by 1996
that number had dropped to 1,341.

I looked up and noticed the handsome self-proclaimed giant was watching me curiously.

'What book has you so absorbed?' he asked.

There's an unwritten law of travel, according to a
New Yorker
article I once read, that if two people are seated next to each other, they will never speak, but if they are separated by
an empty seat or two, they'll become the best of friends.

'It's a book on Japanese baths.'

'Yes, I have heard that Japanese people are very clean.' He smiled, exposing the mysteriously sexy bad teeth of a European.
'Forgive me for not introducing myself, my name is Philippe. And your name is?'

'Alexia.' Ahead of us, the stewardess was demonstrating how to use the flotation device. 'Are you traveling to Tokyo on business?'
I asked.

'Yes. And you?' Philippe replied.

'Business. Sort of,' I said, echoing his vagueness.

'What kind of business?' Philippe probed.

'Business of the floating world,' I said, using the Japanese euphemism I'd just learned for the seamy underworld of sex shops,
strip clubs, and baths that provide 'extra' services.

'Oh, very mysterious. Are you a . . . dancer . . . or a hostess?' Philippe teased.

This was fun. I think it's called flirting - lighthearted banter like an endless tennis volley that picks up speed. Maybe
there would be life after Charles. But I felt terrible as soon as the thought crossed my mind. I should have been mourning
the failure of a two-year relationship that was supposed to end in marriage. Instead I felt a sense of exhilaration and an
appetite for adventure.

The fifteen-hour plane ride passed as quickly as a promising first date - minor revelations, arms that casually brushed up
against each other, elliptical allusions to past and present relationships. Actually, it was like five dates strung together.
We had the dinner date, then the movie date where we talked through the movie, a cocktails date, a chess-playing date, and
a breakfast date.

Soon I had Philippe confessing all sorts of things: he was a modern art dealer in Manhattan, he hadn't finished reading a
book in the last two years, he used to play professional tennis, he was thirty-two and had never had a serious relationship.
He was, in a word, a temptation. I told him about my dream of opening a hamam in Manhattan with Marina and about how my roommate/
boyfriend and I had just split up. He said, 'The problem with living with someone is that you don't have an opportunity to
meet other people.' I was starting to understand why he'd never had a serious girlfriend.

As we neared Tokyo and everyone was filling out their entry forms, Philippe asked me where I was staying.

'I didn't book a room,' I said. 'I'll find something at the train station.' If I had learned nothing else while traveling,
it was that things left to chance always turn out better than you ever could have planned.

Philippe seemed concerned by my apparent homelessness and said, 'A Japanese friend, Mizuo Miyake, is picking me up at the
airport. Mizuo can give you a ride into Tokyo, and I'm sure he can help find you a hotel room.' Philippe didn't seem like
a serial murderer; besides, we did yoga at the same studio in New York and even knew someone in common.

Reading nothing more into his offer than the kind of hospitality and generosity that overseas travel engenders, I accepted
gratefully. Instead of popping another EN AD Alert jet-lag relief pill (it's a good idea to stop at five), finding the train
into Tokyo, and navigating linguistic hurdles to find a hotel, I got to take on the blissfully unencumbered role of passenger.

Since our friendship and strange attachment seemed incongruous for two people who had just met on the plane, Philippe introduced
me to Mr Miyake as a 'friend from yoga who I ran into at the airport and I couldn't believe she was coming to Tokyo, too!'

'It's very nice to meet an old friend of Philippe's,' said Mr Miyake, who drove us via a Gerhard Richter exhibition into the
center of Tokyo. Tokyo's bay and massive bridges melded into a jet-lagged blur of cranes and early autumn sunshine.

Mr Miyake's tidy dollhouse apartment was so small that were one thing out of place, one sock on the floor, one chair overturned,
the entire place would be a mess. Displayed on the living room wall were two curious red-and-white sand panel 'paintings'
- I'm not sure what to call them. Side by side and connected by interlocking glass pipes, one was the Japanese flag, the other
an American. The sand surface was crisscrossed with tens of tiny tunnels of sandblasted emptiness.

'Where did all those little tunnels come from?' I asked.

'Ants,' Mizuo explained.

'Right. Of course,' I said, feigning enough sophistication to make the leap from paintbrush to ant army.

Mizuo served us steaming cups of green tea from his alcove kitchen, and we sat around the small table.

'Mizuo, do you have a favorite onsen?' I asked.

'I think my favorite is Takaragawa, north of Tokyo in the Gumma mountains. It has the most exquisite stone-paved
rotenburo,
an outdoor bath, overlooking a river. Early in the morning the brown bears still bathe in the pools. You know, animals are
responsible for teaching humans about onsen. Wandering monks would see wounded animals bathing and healing themselves in the
onsen waters, and slowly they began to realize that the onsen had curative powers.'

'Have you visited Takaragawa many times?'

'Only once. It is special but very remote, so most often I go to Hakone. It's a one-hour train ride from Tokyo and near enough
to Mt Fuji to see it on a clear day.'

Philippe looked up from his chocolate (he was already halfway through the box he'd brought as a present for Mizuo). 'Onsen,
what are onsen?'

Mizuo explained, '
Onsen
literally is a special kind of curative hot water, the kind of hot water with healthful minerals for bathing or drinking,
like your spas in Belgium and France. And this special, therapeutic hot water is everywhere in Japan, because the entire country
is positioned on top of a volcanic archipelago.' He nabbed a chocolate from the near empty box and continued, 'But if I say
onsen
in conversation, then it means a place to go, like a resort, to take the onsen waters. Some onsen are large, glitzy resorts,
some are
ryokan
— a traditional type of Japanese inn with special bathing facilities - and other onsen are very remote places that you must
hike far to reach.'

Philippe eyed me. 'Maybe you and I should visit an onsen together?'

Mizuo, who I sensed knew Philippe and his predilections well, chimed in, 'Philippe, in Japan men and women do not bathe together.'

'Oh, well, forget it, then,' said Philippe, who winked at me and popped the last chocolate into his mouth. 'Don't worry, I
have another box, Mizuo.'

'Mizuo, why do you visit onsen?' I asked. 'And do all Japanese people go?'

'Yes, almost all Japanese people visit onsen. It's an unusual concept for Westerners to understand, that we go on vacation
with the express purpose of bathing. We will choose an onsen destination based on the beauty of the bath or the type of waters
it has. My mom said she could not conceive until she visited the iron-rich waters of Ikaho, which cured her infertility.'
He raised an eyebrow as if to suggest that he was not a total believer. 'Certainly there are health benefits, but not miracles.
As for why we go, well, it's relaxing. Everyone, especially in Tokyo, is working so hard, so many long "hours. When we go
to onsen we do nothing except bathe, eat, drink, sleep, and bathe. There's even a person to scrub your back if you want. Japanese
men like to revert to childhood sometimes.'

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.