Week 104

Bathe at Tsuru-no-Yu

or, another time I took off all my clothes in front of a number of old men

The rain hangs in the air. It might not even be raining anymore, actually. But the air has the quality of rain, heavy with heat. The woods around us are topographically schizoid, rising and falling in sharp angles. The road lurches the way that only roads laid before the age of cars can. It looks like an attempt at pavement was made many years ago, but in the intervening time traffic and tree roots have wrecked the concrete into plates of rock and rubble. Penelope—which is the name of my 20-year-old subcompact Suzuki—would never be able to handle roads like this. The plowed roads of winter must have been more handleable. It’s counterintuitive. I cough.

We arrive at the onsen. It consists of a family of small wooden buildings huddled on a little level ground. All around are tall bushes and reeds. The platonic form of a brook babbles by on the left. The ground rises steeply behind the onsen, up into the clouds somewhere in a wall of green.

The buildings all look tremendously old, the sort of clumsy rigidity of the old men that patronize them. The roofing is thatched and the walls are all wood worn down by the weather, dark, wrinkled, the edges worn off. A man in a yukata slides a window open and leans out. Our footsteps crunch on the round, wet gravel. I dig in my pocket for a shiny gold dubloon, worth 500 yen, and drop it on a polished counter. I can see the dark shape of the lady behind the counter, kindly-faced, wearing a dark blue apron. She hands us a map with English words on it, all drawn by hand, and laughs courteously.

The bath buildings are dark, rice-papered-windows affairs. Above the doors, on tree trunk cross-sections, The characters for man and woman are written in ink-and-brush. We enter our respective sides.

The changing rooms are cramped and make you feel awkward in your body, all elbows, when you undress. The floor is wooden and so moist it doesn’t creak. The air is heady with the smell of sulfur. The two baths sit separately off the main changing room, behind sliding wooden doors with glass windows. They rattle in their casings as you slide them. The sound is deeply satisfying.

In the Shiro-yu (meaning ‘white bath’), water runs through a gutter on the wall and drains out into the bath, which is big enough for maybe four people who are comfortable with each other. The gutter, the bath, the floor, are all crusted with a hard, smooth mineral deposit from the water. There’s a place where the water drips out of the gutter, at a joint.; the floor below it is raised in a small yellowish stalagmite. The water is lukewarm and milky. You can’t see more than an inch or two into it. I sink in, down to my ears, my nose just above the water’s surface. Sulfur tangs in my nose, which smell I am learning, very slowly, to appreciate.

No one speaks much. A couple of syllables are exchanged in reverence. This onsen has been open since the 1600s. I have no idea how old the buildings are. Everything I’ve seen could have been built in the 1800s, for the technological simplicity of it. The glass in the windows is mottled, warped. The wood is worn way down on the boards leading back outside, to the outside bath. I catch a glimpse of a security camera, hidden inside a wooden box. It’s aimed at the door to the women’s changing room.

The outdoor bath, too, is milky white. It’s not so much a bath as a shallow pool. It’s alongside a public pathway, separated from the rest of the onsen—e.g. the rooms for staying overnight—by a row of tall reeds. It’s a mixed-gender bath, but the only people in it are leathery old men. Most of them sit motionless with closed eyes, statuelike. There’s a suzumebachi, or giant hornet, buzzing around people’s heads. Tony and I scoot to the part of the bath furthest from the hornet. It lands on one old guy’s head. I squirm in place, watching the thing; but the man swats it away with admirable nonchalance. It lands again; he swats again. An old, tremendously wrinkled dude, probably not more than four feet tall, produces a fly swatter from nowhere and kills the hornet when it lands on the rim of the bath. Doesn’t he know that killing them releases the pheromone that attracts more? He flicks it into the bushes. Another hornet appears, skims the water. I stand up and head inside.

The Naka-no-yu (‘inner bath’) is darker, an opalescent gray. It’s also significantly hotter than the others. I sit on the edge of the bath with my legs in the water. When I take my legs out, they’re bright pink from about mid-thigh down, the limn a paper-sharp line. I decide to sit down and count ten slow breaths. It’s brutally warm in the same way that a massage is brutally painful. My runny nose is clear for the first time in days. My skin feels soft, new. I draw my forearm up to my nose and sniff, for some reason. I smell rank. It’s hard to breathe but my body isn’t reacting the way that it normally does when it’s hard to breathe: I feel like I’m getting enough oxygen. I reach ten, don’t want to get out, decide to count another ten.

When I do finally stand I’m sweating profusely. I towel myself off but sweat springs back up on my arms, chest, back. I pull my t-shirt on anyway, my soggy skin bleeding dark islands across my stomach. The sweat from my forehead is dripping into my eyes while I dress. I wrap my towel around my forehead and head out into the cool, rainy afternoon. The sulfur in the air is almost sweet to me, by now.