One Wednesday, when I happened to have a day off work, I packed up some of my heavier clothes and went off in search of a Laundromat. I’d inherited a twin tub that had not worked once, so I’d been washing my clothes by hand. Although this worked fine for lighter things like blouses, skirts and smalls, it was less pleasant to wash heavier items like jeans and sweaters by hand – especially in the winter – and it took them forever to dry. Several people had told me that there was a Laundromat not far away from the next station, and I was determined to find it.

Half an hour later, I was ready to burst into tears:  I’d been on a wild goose chase looking for that elusive Laundromat, and I was damned if I could find it. My feet hurt and the trousers I was wearing weren’t warm enough because all my winter ones were in the pack, desperately in need of a wash. Already I’d asked at least a dozen people, and they always knew just enough to give me hope, but not enough to give me precise instructions. I felt like I was doomed to wander the streets for all eternity, humping twenty pounds of dirty laundry, looking for a Laundromat that really didn’t exist, like some hapless soul in an episode of The Twilight Zone. .

It would have been better if someone had categorically said that there was no Laundromat in the area. The problem was, several people I stopped assured me that the Laundromat was not merely a figment of my imagination. Oh yes, there was definitely a Laundromat in the neighborhood, they were certain they’d seen it, although they themselves had never used it. When I asked them exactly where it was, though, they would furrow their brows and begin to hem and haw.

‘Next to the supermarket, the new one,’ said a middle-aged woman with shopping bags hanging from the bars of her pink moped. She had a page-boy haircut an improbable shade of blue; a toy poodle a lot better groomed than I stared up at me from the moped’s basket. The woman had stopped to talk to a couple, an elderly pair who looked as though they were out for a walk.

‘No,’ the elderly woman put in, 'that’s not a Laundromat, that’s a dry cleaner’s.’

Her male companion disagreed. ‘Nonsense! The dry cleaning place is next to the pharmacy over in the old mall.’

‘That’s the old one,’ said yet another woman who had just joined our small group. ‘And it’s not a dry cleaner’s anymore, they’ve changed hands. It’s a pet shop now.’  She glanced at me with obvious curiosity.

‘Wasn’t that Yonezawa’s place? Before his wife got cancer?’ 

‘Diabetes. She had diabetes.’

‘She had diabetes and cancer. Anyway, we already have enough dry cleaners around here.’

I felt like jumping up and down and screaming, but instead I cleared my throat. ‘Umm, the Laundromat . . .?’

They all stared at me for a moment as though they’d forgotten what I was doing there. The middle-aged woman smiled indulgently.  ‘Have you asked at the police box? They’d  know.’

‘Where’s the police box?’ I asked with growing despondency. This was my day off! At the very least, I wanted to sit some place warm and quiet and have a good hot cup of coffee.

‘Back that way,’ the woman said, pointing in the direction I’d just been in. But my pack was heavy and I was loath to retrace my steps.

‘Excuse me,’ I asked a young mother with her baby strapped to her back, ‘would you know where the Laundromat is?’

The woman looked at me nervously; she had tried to avoid eye contact with me at first, obviously fearing that  I was going to accost her in English.  ‘I think it’s next to the pharmacy at the mall.  Near the park.’

My heart sank. ‘No, I don’t mean the dry cleaner’s.’

She misunderstood me. ‘Oh. If it’s a dry cleaner’s you want, that’s next to the supermarket.’

And so it went. One man would hazard that it was across from the pachinko parlor, not the big one near the station, but the older one three doors down from the used car lot. His wife would say oh no it wasn’t, that place closed two months ago, don’t you remember? My head ached from trying to understand everybody,  my heavy pack was  biting into my shoulders, and The Twilight Zone was beginning to merge into Monty Python Comes to Japan.

Just as I was beginning to tell myself that wearing dirty jeans for the next week wouldn’t be the end of the world, a young woman approached me. She looked to be about my age, but a little tired and careworn, and she had a distracted air about her.

‘Do you need help?’ she asked shyly.

‘Oh yes, please!  I’ve been trying to find the Laundromat.’

She wrinkled her brow. ‘I don’t know where it is, but I’ve got a map of the neighborhood at home. Maybe it’ll be on that.’  I was tempted to tell her that I would go and ask at the police box – they were bound to know there, after all – but I decided to go with her, reasoning that her apartment was probably closer.  I was relieved to know that she had a map of the neighborhood:  almost all Japanese neighborhoods have a map that not only shows you the name and location of every business, but the names of every person in each individual house. The trick, however, is finding one when you need it. In some neighborhoods, they are handily posted where a poor lost soul can find them; in others, they are craftily hidden away and you have to figure things out for yourself. Japanese streets are generally not named; cities and towns are divided into areas, sub-areas, and blocks.  Houses and apartments in each sub-area are not geographically numbered, as new units are constantly being built between old lots, and finding your way around in a strange neighborhood can be hellish. You really have to pity Japanese postmen; after a few months in Japan, I certainly did.

Unfortunately, the woman’s house was at least half a kilometre away, through a warren of dark, meandering little side streets.  She walked fast, as though she were in a hurry to get home. Already tired and weighed down by my heavy pack, I had to struggle to keep up with her.

‘Here we are,’ she said at last, in front of a small, shabby house in a housing tract. ‘This is where I live. Come on in!’

Stepping through the door, I could smell the raw, grassy musk of new tatami coupled with sour milk and unwashed clothes. The house was reasonably tidy, but you got the feeling that whoever lived there was a busy person. I heard a baby crying, and when I looked in the direction of the noise I saw a very small toddler, a child barely old enough to walk, come toddling towards us. The woman stooped down and picked him up.

‘This is Gen, my little boy!  Gen say hello to the nice lady!’

I stared at Gen. A stream of yellow-green snot ran from his nose straight down to his chin. He stared back at me uncertainly from his mother’s arms and hiccoughed, still whimpering. I looked to see who had been caring for the child in his mother’s absence, but no one else seemed to be around. This troubled me.

The woman seemed in no hurry to go and look for the neighborhood map. She gave Gen a kiss and joggled him a bit in her arms to get him to stop crying.

I couldn’t help it, I just had to ask. I pointed to Gen and said ‘Hitori de?’  There was probably a better way of asking if her baby had been left alone, but I didn’t know how else to say it.

She nodded, misinterpreting my ‘all alone?’ to mean ‘Are you by yourself.’  She juggled Gen in her arms again and said to me, ‘His father is in America,’ as though that explained everything.

‘Oh,’ I said as though I understood – even though I didn’t.

‘He is American.’

‘Oh!’  I looked at Gen, and suddenly realized that he was Eurasian. I didn’t know what to say. She was stuck here with the baby, poor kid, but her husband was back in America. ‘What state is your husband from, if you don’t mind my asking?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said softly.  ‘And he is not my husband.’

Oh dear.

I held Gen while his mother went to look for the neighborhood map. But he wasn’t having any of it. ‘Mama!’ he wailed, his arms stretched out towards her.

I tried jiggling him about the way his mother had done. ‘Gen, Gen!  Look out the window there!’ I positioned him so that he could see the birds in one of the trees outside, but he strained away from me. ‘Mama!’

‘I think he wants you!’

‘Oh, he always wants me. You always want me, don’t you Gen?’  She had the map now, I was relieved to see, and was beginning to open it.

‘Would you like me to look at the map instead?’ I hazarded, trying to make myself heard above her baby’s screams.  Poor little Gen had a streaming cold, it seemed.  God knew what he’d been doing in the house before we arrived, but it hadn’t been wiping his own nose.

‘No, no, I’ll look – but if you could just hold him for me while I do . . .’  She opened the map and started looking for the Laundromat.

Part of me was relieved. Maps are a challenge for me even when they’re written in English, and I found Japanese maps even more confusing. But hanging onto Gen was getting damned tricky: he didn’t like the idea that he’d been parked with a stranger and that his mother’s attention was elsewhere, and he was beginning to get agitated. He squirmed and fidgeted and strained away from me and I wondered why I was supposed to hold him when he had obviously been ranging freely about the house before we got back.

Gen began to struggle fiercely, and I had to put him down. He toddled off to his mother, arms outstretched. ‘Mama, mama, mama!’

I’m not sure how long it took Gen’s mother to scan the map and find that there was no Laundromat indicated anywhere. Five minutes? Ten?  It felt like a lot longer. I began to feel panicky. I was never going to get my clothes washed!  ‘Maybe I should just go and ask at the police box . . .?’ 

At first she insisted that she was sure it would be there on the map – it had to be. She’d find it – it was just a matter of looking.  Finally, though, she had to concede defeat. Gen was hanging on to her leg and wailing for all he was worth, crying to be picked up, to be noticed, to be loved. ‘I don’t understand it:  it just doesn’t seem to be on the map. I really am sorry. I’m positive that there used to be one next to the pharmacy in the old mall.’

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the former dry cleaner’s was now a pet shop. ‘That’s okay,’ I said, desperately relieved to be able to get out of there. ‘I expect they’ll know where it is at the police box. I probably should have asked there to begin with.’

‘Yes,’ she said a little sadly, ‘they’re bound to know at the police box. She picked up Gen and jiggled him abstractedly on one hip. ‘You wouldn’t want a cup of coffee, would you?’

I could see past her into her tiny kitchen, the sink piled high with unwashed dishes. I despaired of ever finding the Laundromat. ‘No, but thank you anyway.’

Stepping back into my shoes in the entrance-way and shouldering my backpack, I turned to wave goodbye to her and Gen.  It suddenly struck me that I didn’t even know her name.

‘Come back and visit us any time!’ she called out, shaking Gen’s little wrist lightly so that his hand flopped back and forth. ‘We’re always here!  Aren’t we Gen-gen? We never go anywhere!’

I smiled and waved one last time. I had no intention of visiting them again. But to this day I wish I had.