December 2009 Archives

I had stayed in the hot springs for much too long and had gotten up way too fast.  As I tried to rehydrate my body, I had passed out, fallen as the old expression goes, "like a ton of bricks."  When I awoke, I did not know where I was.  Vision came back in an unfocused, blurry sort of way, like an old television slowly warming up.  I realized I was in a bathroom of some sort, and that I was surrounded by naked men.  I was not in Italy, the land of the endless fig tree, but in Japan.  This fact came much later.  Both European tourists and Japanese salarymen or perhaps tourists asked me if I was okay.  I said I was in the same way we all say "okay" without much thinking or meaning.

My clothes once again lay scattered around me and as I had fell, I had pulled other baskets down upon me.  I was lucky I hadn't pulled the entire metal rack down on me, or fallen and hit my head on the tile.  Coins from my pocket laid around me and I slowly stood up and bent down to pick them up.  It was then that I realized the visual position I was putting my concerned rescuers in, as I bent over to retrieve a dollar coin.  Needless to say, when I turned around, they were all mysteriously gone.  Some may have ran out without even being fully dressed.  Huh.

I walked back to the pool and sat by the edge of it.  My friend hadn't heard me fall, just like my parents.  When I eventually got back in, we made small talk again, and maybe it was in my head, but something was different from when I first met him.  I thought back to the night at the river and the ugly scene I made.  Lying in the hot water, I looked up at the leaves and mountain of the open air bath. 

I was in Japan, living the dream I had set when I was that child who had broken his fever in the shower.  I was not that child anymore. In the bath, I wondered if I was the ugly young man at the river or the boy in the shower.  I was living the dream of the boy, but I knew not of what the young man's dream was that I would soon have to live.

Underneath the last leaves of Mt. Kurama, I stared up at the cloudy sky and waited for my vision to clear.

Weeks before I'm reaching for my clothes at Mt. Kurama I'm sitting in my host family's bath, relaxing.  I'm debating on how long I should stay in the bath.  Some websites concerning living with a host family explain that one should stay in the bath long enough so that your host family knows you have accepted their culture of soaking in the bath, and also enjoy it.  I'm wondering if that means ten minutes.  I'm already bored of lying here.

After twenty minutes of checking my watch, I stand up to dry off and get dressed.  I place a plastic, foldable cover over top of the tub.  There are small, rubber sections that connect each piece of plastic together, like the folds of an accordion. As I stand up, the heat from the bath races my consciousness upwards.  It wins.

The darkness creeps to the side of my eyes, but it does not take them completely.  I am falling, very quickly, one hundred and eighty pounds of dead weight descending like the fiery payload of some untested weapon towards the tub.  It is in this moment that something indescribable happens.

I will describe it here.

A series of picture, mini-movies, visions, memories, dreams, thoughts, all flash before my eyes.  Each one lasts for its duration, but I see them in only microsecond bursts.  I cannot remember nearly anything I saw, and like a dream forgotten, the more I try to grasp its contents, the more it squirms away from me.  I'd like to think I saw a shy first kiss on a snow filled night under a magnetic red and purple sky, or falling asleep next to someone I loved, or moments of understanding or growth. 

I saw not only memories but thoughts in my head, what I was doing after the bath, the next day, after Japan, and so on.  These imagines are cut off and my face and body are careening towards the bath cover.  I do not feel any fear, but a sudden serenity.  I wonder if this is what someone feels right before they hit the ground when their parachute doesn't open.

The sound of the crash is deafening and the cover is ripped in two.  I hear the crash but do not feel it.  I don't feel anything.  When I can open my eyes, I am staring down at the water, mere inches from my face.  I wonder again how lucky I am. Before I leave, I place the two pieces of cover together, to keep the heat in.  

When I dress and leave the bathroom, no one asks what happened.  Maybe they didn't hear it, or if they did, figured it was something small and ordinary. 

To this day, they have never asked how the cover was broken or if I did it.  Truthfully, I wouldn't know how to explain it.

But unfortunately for me, this moment in time is swallowed by the tides of Mt. Kurama. 

Fever dreams of hot and cold take hold of me and bring me back years before to the house I lived in throughout high school.  I had a fever, for the first time that I could ever remember.  Even wrapped up in half a dozen blankets, that same, seeping cold of the river would crawl inside and refuse to leave.  Just as suddenly, the frost would vanish from my blood and be replaced by the bubbling, hot magma of the onsen.  Time was irrelevant and passed in hopscotch fashion, ten minutes forward, then forty, hours, stop, take two steps back.  A loopy mess of half consciousness.

A moment of clarity.  I stumble to the bathroom, my body is back in the river.  I turn the shower spiggot to hot and watch the mirror fog up.  A comforter is wrapped around my shoulders like a superhero who called in sick and I bring it in with me and leave it curled around the vanity, toilet, and shower.  My clothes fall in a heap of clammy sweat, and I stumble into the shower and let the heat tear through the ice in me. 

Just as the cold evaporates and I feel relief, all strength and time dissolve into unconsciousness.  There is a loud crash that I do not register.  When I awake, I am on my knees, the shower still blasting hot water down upon my back, the metal faucet and temperature handles mere inches from my face.  Had I landed differently, my jaw could have shattered, my mouth full of broken enamel and bone. 

But I am fine.  I stand up again.  I should get out of the tub.  The darkness comes without any warning this time and when I awake again, I hear my parents shouting through the locked bathroom door.  The shower rod lies askew on the toilet and I am wrapped in it, sprawled upon a soaking blanket, my head inches from the sink.  Had I fallen further, my head would have hit off it.  But I am fine. 

My father opens the door and brings my naked body back into my bedroom and tucks me back in.  My mother looks on worriedly.  These things I only half remember.

But all of this, is not happening.  It has happened.  This is just a flash of what I saw before I woke up face down in my host family's bath tub.

It is night.  I sit, a bottle of gin and two Coke Zeros lay beside me.  Two of my friends sit beside each other, an arm's length away from me, slowly getting drunk and enjoying Japanese beer.  We talk about life, play Never Have I Ever, and chat about life.  This is not the first time we've gone to the river to drink, but it will be one of the last, for the weather is turning cold and I'm afraid my welcome is nearly worn out.  We are all partially drunk, although in these quiet moments of night, it doesn't really matter until you stand up.

The Hirakata River stretches out and loops around behind our shoulders, towards the gritty, colored neon downtown.  It is the first month of being in Japan and I feel lonely and adrift.  It is not just from being abroad.  No, I had the first experience of being truly cut off from everyone I knew just a month ago in State College, but this was different.  I was one of the oldest students here at Kansai Gaidai and compared to many of the people around me, I still didn't have my life on track for when I returned.  Everything past the given moment was an unknown that, as long as it wasn't focused upon, didn't bother me in the least.

The couple beside me smile and talk in that quiet, intimate way that couples do and I can only smile at how familiar and nice this scene is, how kind they are to each other, and think back to the girl back home I have.  Loneliness seeps in from every corner and I drink heavily, as do they.

We are all sufficiently drunk and his girlfriend has headed to the bathroom when I announce that I'm going to swim in the river.  I feel numb and I stupidly think that this will make me feel alive.  I undress quickly and silently in the still night, and I feel no sense of shame, the gin has seen to that.  Unbeknownst to me, in the daylight, weeks from now, I will be in a similar position.

The river is freezing, and its chill seeps into the cracks in my character.  I can only stand it for a minute or two before I climb onto the cracked concrete and pull my clothes on over my soaking body.  She returns from the bathroom and does not know of what has transpired, but she will, in time.

Before we leave, they ask me about my life, about the girl back home, and the cracks below the surface heave and erupt, like a long forgotten earthquake.  I answer nonchalantly at first, and then it comes in waves, the loneliness, the jealousy, the sadness, the happiness.  I try to instill wisdom in them, to tell them to appreciate what they have, to learn from my mistakes, but they don't know me, and it all comes out in an angry, self important way, that only serves as a way to let me wallow more in past mistakes made.

I don't think they will ever look at me the same way again.  I am cold and drunk.  We say goodbye at the station and I look towards the river through the train's window of the choices I've made.

But I am not on the train.  I am lying face down in the bathtub back home, nearly drowning. 

The second half of my trip was ending when I went to Mt. Kurama with my friends.  I had been there before to climb the mountain with Suzie and Mr. Shigeoka, and at night to see the fire festival, both stories for another day, I'm afraid.  But now, we headed to Mt. Kurama for one reason and one reason alone, to go to an Onsen, or a hot spring.

Now, I didn't know that's where we were going that day.  I thought I was heading up into the mountains to climb Mt. Kurama, as I did before with Suzie.  After walking up a long, spiraling road that was barely big enough for two cars, our group, tired from a few hours of walking, began to seek out the Onsen. 

I had been told to bring a towel, and as my fears suggested, I should not ask questions and just hope for the best.  I have nothing against public nudity at all.  It's entirely the opposite.  What I was afraid of, and have always been afraid of, is others seeing me.  We all suffer from one form of insecurity or another, but for years, mine has been centrally placed on my weight.  From an early age, I had been overweight, and it was nobody's fault but my own.  It wasn't until dieting and a growth spurt in my sophomore year in college that I began to even accept the way I looked.

Over the course of last summer, when I had taken two intensive Japanese classes back to back, I had put on fifteen to twenty pounds while I lived in an apartment by myself.  Having lived with my parents during college, I hadn't really experienced the famous Freshman 15, and had actually lost weight throughout.  However, the pressure of the class combined with the stress and loneliness, with a dash of care packages from home, all equaled weight gain.

Flash forward to the end of the first week in Japan.  Walking three to four miles a day, eating became an afterthought as I explored my surroundings with my new companions.  By the end of the week, I had lost almost ten pounds (it seemed, I had no scales to verify), and looked visibly thinner.

Now, living with a host mother that was always intent on me being stuffed to the gills with good food, I had put the weight back on.  Now, this isn't some sort of pity piece designed to make me feel better or you to empathize with me.  Most of us have to deal with our own imperfections and in the interest of being perfectly honest with you dear readers, I wanted to let you know why I was so apprehensive in going on this trip.

But that doesn't matter.  What matters is we did go to the Onsen and I, along with a male friend, headed into the male side of the Onsen, while the two female friends entered their respective side.  In Japan, public baths and hot springs are divided by gender in most cases, except if a family rents a private room in which all can bathe together.

The night was cold and the first traces of snow had fallen while we searched for the Onsen.  It had melted before it had even hit the ground, but it was a reminder of how much colder it was up in the scenic mountains.  The Onsen itself was built alongside the mountain, with a large building that encompassed indoor baths, massage tables and chairs, and a cafeteria separate from the outdoor baths that we had chosen.

Inside the male section lay a small line of shelves with baskets for one's clothes, if they didn't want to pay for a locker.  Your clothes or belongings could be stolen at any time, but invoking the Japan Rule (it's Japan, everyone is nice, there's supposedly no crime, yadda yadda), I used the free baskets to store my clothing.  My friend did the same.  In the same room, lay the coin lockers and two sinks and mirrors.  The room was cramped and men both undressed and dressed in the small space.  Without further adieu, in the midst of the milieu of naked guys, we undressed quickly and quietly, in the way that men seem to do.  We're focused on the task at hand, we understand the potential awkwardness, but by not verbally addressing it, it is seemingly not there.

But it is, and the thought that "it's only nudity, after all" replays in my head over and over, and with that, we move into the next room.  The next room is quite large and outdoors.  On the right hand side is a large pool filled with three to four feet of naturally hot spring water, that pours forth from a large spigot from the side of the pool.  The left side has a row of mirrors and stools for which to sit on and wash one's hair.  Next to these and closest to the dressing room are two doorless, shower stalls.  Soap and shampoo are provided.  Body towels and modesty towels (to cover one's figs) are extra and can be paid for when buying the entry ticket.

We showered (not together, mind you. Although there's nothing wrong with that, if you're into that, and are two, consenting adults, or are just mildly schizophrenic, ahem) and entered the bath.  There is a moment, where your figs are just hanging in the breeze and all of the gentlemen in the Onsen are merely staring up at you, either eyeballing you or visually inviting you with the slightest of manly nods into the onsen (which I will stop capitalizing here for no reason other than I don't really think it should be capitalized) which say "I accept you, man," or something to that effect.

Once in, one simply relaxes. I don't think I was either good enough friends with my companion or perhaps it was simply against protocol to make anything other than small talk in there, because that is precisely what we did once or twice during the hour we stayed in.  From the corner of that bath, I could see another door leading to a sauna, but after my last disastrous attempt of going into a sauna without a towel, I was content to just rest in the onsen.

Thirty-five minutes later, I was feeling a little too warm and heading my friend's example, I decided to get out for a bit and cool off.  I had brought a bottle of water with me and had placed it alongside my clothes, a t-shirt, hoodie, and a pair of jeans that were filled with far too much change.  Just as my friend returned to the pool, I exited and walked into the changing room and made my way over to my belongings. 

The changing room wasn't that crowded and just as I arrived, had mostly cleared out.  As my hand reached towards my basket of clothes, the blood rushed through my dehydrated body to my brain.

And then, everything went black.