There were a lot of advantages to my new apartment. It took me less twenty minutes to get to work now, and under an hour to get into Tokyo.  The train line I lived on was much nicer, too:  for some reason, there were fewer drunks. There were decent restaurants and coffee houses near the station I used, and a Laundromat was only a few minutes away. Best of all, there was a real sense of community in Hakuraku, my new home.

            There were disadvantages, too, though, and one of them was cockroaches. It was summer, and because the building was old, it was heavily infested. As I was walking across the room one day, a huge cockroach suddenly shot out from between two tatami mats and flew right at me, giving me the shock of my life. I screamed my head off and scared some of the other residents; one of them actually came over to see what had happened and I had to confess that a cockroach had merely taken me by surprise.  At night, roaches would fly indoors from outside, great, huge creatures with glistening brown shells and long, tapering antennae, obviously full of eggs they were looking for a place to lay. I can handle mice, snakes, lizards and rats, but my tolerance fails me when it comes to cockroaches.

            One day, after waking up to find an absurdly large roach on the business end of my new toothbrush, I knew something had to be done. I didn’t want to use aerosol insecticides, though, so I found out how to say ‘boric acid powder’ in Japanese (hosan) and bought a large box of this, which I dusted about liberally. To further reduce their numbers, I took to stuffing all my plastic grocery bags into the cracks between tatami mats. The mats were old and loose, and I must have dispatched over a hundred plastic bags this way. I often wonder what the landlord must have thought when he changed the tatami and found all those crumpled plastic bags of mine. And what might they have thought about the deposits of boric acid powder lying between the mats in drifts and clumps?  Perhaps all the cockroach corpses were a dead give-away, so to speak:  my methods were so effective that I had almost no roaches for the duration of the summer.

            Then there was the bath issue.  Although I am a native Californian, I am a closet Victorian and not comfortable with the idea of being naked around a group of strangers. Nervous about trying out the neighborhood sento, for the first three days after I moved, I made do with sponge baths in my miniscule kitchen. It was a hot and sticky summer, and I longed for a proper bath in a real tub, yet I could not bring myself to go to the neighborhood public bath on my own. I told Caroline at work about my new ‘apartment’ and its lack of a bathroom, and she commiserated, but assured me that using the public bath was perfectly unembarrassing.

            “I’ve been using the public bath in my neighborhood for the past two weeks now while they’re fixing my bathtub, and it’s really not that bad.”

            I perked up at this. “What’s it like? Is it true that there’s a man who collects the money and he can see into both sides?”

            Todd had told me about this and I hadn’t believed it, but others had since confirmed that this was true.

            Caroline nodded. “Sometimes it’s a man, sometimes it’s a woman.”

            “And you can never tell which one it’s going to be?”

            “No, ‘fraid not.”

            “And he or she can see into both sides?”

            She laughed. “It’s not that bad! He’s too busy taking people’s money to turn around and watch them get undressed. Besides, he’d probably lose his job if he did.”

            “Why does he even need to be there? I can understand him being there, but why does he have to have a view of everyone in the baths?”

            “I don’t know. Presumably to make sure nobody slips or burns themselves with the hot water. Or drowns in the bath, come to think of it. There’s three separate baths just on the women’s side and they’re deep enough to drown in.”

            “So what do I need to take with me? That is, when I get up the courage to go.”

            “A plastic basin. And soap. And a towel. You know – the stuff you normally use. And people usually bring two towels – a bath towel and another smaller one to, ah, protect their modesty.”

            “Is there a place where you can wash your hair?”

            “Of course. Look, why don’t you come with me to my public bath? My station is just a stop away from yours on the train, and once you feel comfortable there, you can start going to your own and maybe you won’t feel so self conscious.”  I told her that was a great idea and we made arrangements to meet that evening.

            As it turned out, the receptionist on duty in Caroline’s neighborhood bath that evening was a woman. She seemed friendly in a bored sort of way as she took our money and pointed us in the right direction.

            It was fun. You took your shoes off and put them into one of about a hundred small cubicles that you locked with a wooden key. Then you paid your bath fee to the bandai, or bath attendant, and walked through the curtained entrance marked ‘Women’s Side.’  Once there, you got undressed in the changing area, a huge space with mirrors and dressing tables and a wall of cubbyholes, leaving your clothes in a plastic basket. Then, naked save for your modesty towel and wash basin, you made your way to the baths.  

            It was also weird. One minute, you were in your clothes, covered, protected and dignified, and the next you were stark naked, reduced to just so much flesh. And you were in the company of a lot of your neighbors: people you were used to seeing every day with all their clothes on – and vice versa. There, washing her hair, was the lady who worked at the greengrocer’s, chatting with the elderly woman who lived just four doors down. And across from her was one of the girls who lived in the same house, on the ground floor, and behind her was the crazy woman you saw sometimes on your way back from the station. All just like you:  completely naked.

            Though, of course, in one respect we weren’t just like them: we weren’t Japanese. We attracted a fair amount attention, though it was not obnoxious or off-putting. Children who were with their mothers pointed us out, and we could hear the odd whispered  gaijin as we made our way to the faucets for a pre-bathing wash.

            In Japan, you wash off before you get into the bath. I was initially told that this had to be a very thorough washing with special attention paid to feet, genitals, and armpits. Only when those areas had been well cleaned, my informant maintained, could one get into the communal bath for a good steep. While this was the idea in principle, in practice virtually no one did this. Most people just gave themselves a perfunctory splash, perhaps with an indifferent application of soap here and there; then, after a brief rinse, they made their way to the baths and got in. It was a little off-putting, frankly. At least in a public swimming pool the water is chlorinated and you know that whatever germs people bring into the water will be killed. Not so in most public baths where the water is merely hot. Still, the water was changed every day and skimmed frequently, and it looked reasonably clean. I followed Caroline through the steamy room and tried not to think about all those unwashed feet, crotches and armpits.  Or, for that matter, the stuff they were skimming off the top with fine-meshed nets on bamboo poles.

The bathroom walls and floor were tiled. The front part of the room was taken up by rows of hot-and-cold spigots where women sat on low stools and washed themselves. Each washing point had its own hot and cold tap, plus a shower attachment for washing hair. Caroline and I found plastic stools; we sat down and cleaned ourselves, scrubbing each other’s backs as we observed all the ladies around us doing, then we got into one of the baths.  We got out again very quickly: it was intolerably hot. A few women, watching us surreptitiously, smiled, though not in a nasty way. And after all, we must have looked pretty funny in our haste to scramble out of the bath almost as soon as we’d gotten in. I was amazed at how many women managed to stay inside the bath for so long without fainting or being sick. I was impressed with myself just for sticking it out those ten seconds.

Caroline called to me from one of the other baths. “This one’s a little cooler.”  I dipped a nervous toe in and found that it was.

It was pleasant to sit in hot water right up to your neck and relax, knowing that you were already clean and had finished all your bathing work. We watched as other women came in, each one discreetly clasping her small towel over her pubic area. Children and babies came in with mothers and grandmothers, and the whole atmosphere was wonderfully peaceful and friendly as women called out to friends and acquaintances and scrubbed each other’s backs. Mothers washed their children’s hair and, to my amazement, shaved their daughters’ faces. Walking back to the station afterwards, I asked Caroline when her bath was going to be fixed.

“Next week they’re supposed to be finishing the work on it.”

“Mind if I meet you here tomorrow evening too?”

She laughed. “Don’t you want to try your own neighborhood bath, Mary?”

“Well, I will eventually, but now that I’ve been to yours,  I’m more comfortable there.”

“Well, all right, then, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The next evening I repeated the process, then took the train home again. I did feel a little silly clutching my plastic basin and bag of toiletries, but nevertheless I went to Caroline’s neighborhood bath again the following evening too.

Caroline sighed and shook her head. “You keep putting it off, but pretty soon you’ll have to give your own sento a go, Mary. And my bathtub is going to be fixed tomorrow, by the way.”   I was tempted to ask her if she would let me use her bath, but managed to resist the urge. I made sure that I got extra clean that night – just in case.

The next night I had a sponge bath, but the following evening, I couldn’t put it off any longer. I got together all my toiletries and walked to my neighborhood bath. I didn’t have the courage to go right in, though, so I walked around the block a few times. Finally I took a deep breath and marched up to the door. It was shut, which seemed odd; most of the time it was just left open and bathers came and went freely. There was a notice taped to it, so I moved closer to read it:

            THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONTINUED PATRONAGE. WE ARE CLOSED TODAY FOR OUR TWICE-MONTHLY  INSPECTION.  WE DEEPLY REGRET THE INCONVENIENCE.

What a relief!  I went home and had another sponge bath.