March 2001
Marc Pachon '96
Kyoko
and I arrived at the Mawaki onsen (public bath) at 5:50 p.m. We
walked past it up a covered, wooden path that stretched up to the
hotel at the top of the mountain. In the empty restaurant, we were
greeted by a young woman in the hotel's uniform. She informed us that
the restaurant wouldn't be officially open for another 5 minutes, but
we were free to sit at a table and look at the menus. We took the
table closest to the entrance because of its view of the bay, and I
was glad we had arrived while it was still daylight.
The prices were higher than we had remembered--twice what I was used to paying. But it was the only restaurant around that did not specialize in noodles, so we ordered and then started talking about nothing. A group of six old men came into the restaurant and started smoking and talking loudly at their table right behind us. The smoke bothered me more than the noise because I'm used to blocking out the constant conversations around me I can't understand yet. The food arrived, and we ate quickly--Kyoko getting my pickles and I snagging some of her cooked fish. It was a good meal, but I knew I'd be hungry again after the onsen.
We finished an hour after arriving, having slowed down later in the meal to discuss bigger nothings. I told Kyoko about my dream house design, which sidetracked into a discussion of how I would change if I had the money to build it. Kyoko likes me the way I am, and I'm not sure that I do. I feel like I have some huge change in personality approaching, but I don't know when or what it will be. Maybe Kyoko sensed it, too, and was afraid about its implications. I'm not too worried about my future with her, though. Uso. After eating, I paid, and we left for the baths.
I carried her piggyback down the pathway for no good reason, and we arrived at the onsen laughing. Kyoko pointed out the moon, now just above the tree line. It was in one of those phases where the crescent is illuminated, but the rest of the sphere looks darker than the surrounding sky. We bought tickets at the machine and looked at the clock: 7:02.
"Let's meet at 8," I said.
"Mmmm ... 8:15, yo," she said in a bilingual mix.
"An hour's good enough, ne?"
"But I have the stone side, yo." She smiled at me. We both think that the stone side of the onsen is better than the wood side. This onsen is divided by sex, and which gender is on which side changes every week. Unfortunately for me, the last three times we've come, I've had the wood side. Kyoko isn't exactly crushed for me.
"Well, I'll be here in an hour," I say, playing my typical games. "We'll see how strong your feelings for me are.... You know, whether you'd make me wait miserably out here while you enjoy the stone side for a few more minutes."
She wrinkled her face. "8:15, yo, since I don't want to rush." Point, Kyoko.
"Tell you what, 8:15, but you owe me a favor."
"Like what?"
"Don't know yet. I'll cash it in at my leisure."
She glanced at the clock. "Now it's 7:08, so yappari, it's only an hour."
"Too bad. You'll still owe me."
We kissed and went to our respective sides. A wooden porch with matching wooden shelves marked the "shoes-off" boundary, and I removed mine and placed them on one of the shelves. There were little key lockers available, but I like to give humanity the benefit of the doubt. Not only do I feel pretty sure about my possessions in rural Japan, but my shoe size is also an inch larger than most Japanese brands go.
I ducked under the split-cloth curtain and opened the wooden sliding door to the changing room. Like most onsen changing rooms, it consisted of a sink/mirror area for post-bath primping and a series of wooden cabinets and shelves for possessions. The shelves had large wicker baskets on them, and I stripped quickly and placed everything in one of them. Another sliding door led to the indoor section of the baths, and I entered armed with only a small blue towel and my glasses.
The first stop was the shower area. "You need to be clean to enter the baths," I once told my friends visiting from LA. I soaped, shampooed, and rinsed in about 15 minutes. I try to take a little longer in this stage than the Japanese around me, a small contribution to the fight against stereotypes of the dirty foreigner. This hygienically and culturally cleansing activity finished, I proceeded to one of the actual baths.
The indoor pools in onsens are typically much hotter than the outdoor ones. This particular onsen had three indoor pools, two of which were moderately hot, and the third--the pool that fed water to the other two--barely tolerable. I sat in the uncomfortable one for about 5 minutes and allowed most of my muscles to melt out through my pores. Aaahhhhhh.
I moved outside, to the salted pools. I will, at some point, find out what they put into these treated pools, but I am currently ignorant. It gives a yellow tint to the water and has a salty taste. The wood side of Mawaki onsen had four outdoor pools, two of them treated. In each case, a small, hot, elevated pool served as a feeder to a more shallow but much larger pool.
I slid into the shallow treated pool and lay back, using my towel as a pillow. The water in the pool was almost perfect body temperature. This was the part of the onsen that I loved. To my right, a raspy speaker was attempting to play radio music. I let the static and the Japanese lyrics run together into a meditative white noise and scanned the sky. In one of life's perfect moments, my ears picked up the voice of an old man in the deeper pool singing at the same time that my eyes locked on to the comet. The moon was in front of me, black and white against the navy sky, and a few degrees to its right was Hale-Bopp at its brightest, a speckled teardrop half the size of the moon. The elderly bather's scratchy voice traced over a Japanese folk song and perfected the mood. I had no job to complete, no meeting to go to, and the onsen provided the perfect excuse to do nothing and enjoy it. Some of my friends smoke to achieve this state, others hang out at coffee bars. The Japanese have the onsen.
For about 20 minutes, I watched the moon slowly descend from view. Around the same time it disappeared behind the small building housing the sauna, a group of college-aged men entered the outdoor area. They entered the pool I was in and started talking loudly to each other. One of them pointed to the comet and shifted the conversation. The Japanese pronounced it "Hey-bup," in two quick syllables. I left the pool and entered the sauna.
The sauna is the polar opposite of the onsen pools. In the pools, my mind slows down, and the world gels into a few very mellow observations. In the sauna, my heart starts to race, and every breath, every second goes by fully realized. Thoughts rush through my mind, trying to distract me from the heat, but my consciousness keeps returning to the intense discomfort of the room. I don't know how much hotter Japanese saunas are, but I've never counted the seconds in a U.S. sauna. After five minutes by the little egg timer next to the entrance, I left to enter the cold pool.
It's outside, next to the sauna, and the near-freezing water provides an experience I've always imagined akin to a lightning strike. My mind cleared like a jostled Etch-a-Sketch, and simple bodily activities like blood flow and heart pumping suddenly became the focus of my existence. I usually enter, then hold my breath under water for as long as possible. (Two-and-a-half minutes is my record.) This marked the end of my onsen routine. I emerged from my cold dip, imagining icicles forming on my body as I walked across the outdoor area and re-entered the building. Inside, I returned to one of the shower stalls and rinsed off my body quickly, removing salt and sweat that the cold dip didn't take care of. I also rinsed out my towel, which I then used to towel the water off myself. I checked the clock: 8:05.
Putting on my clothes and hand combing my hair back to a semblance of order took another five minutes, and I left the men's side of the onsen five minutes early. Kyoko was waiting for me, a little smile of triumph on her face.
"Osoi, yo." She tapped her watch and raised an eyebrow.
"I guess I owe you a favor." I smiled, put my arm around her, and we left the baths.
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