Cathedrals of the Flesh (21 page)

'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!)