Strip Bare, and We're All Acquaintances

Back in the days of Edo, I settled myself for a while in a back-alley tenement and kept a little shop selling komamono — the small sundries of daily life, combs and hairpins and the like.

As for the pleasures of that time — well, first and foremost there was the daily yuya, the bathhouse; what we would call a public bath nowadays. When the sun began to dip, I would take up my hand-towel and hurry off there, glad as could be.

Why did everyone want so badly to go to the bathhouse? If it were only a matter of washing off the sweat, a basin of water in the yard would have done. But that was not it at all. The yuya was the meeting-place of the whole town. In Edo, where fires came so often, a bath of one's own was a thing no one could keep unless he ran a great established shop indeed. So everyone gathered at the bathhouse. There the gossip of the whole quarter went flying about, deals were struck, and quarrels and reconciliations alike, more often than not, happened in the steam.

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It happened one evening.

It was around 1813 (Bunka 10). Freshened up from my soak, I climbed to the upper floor. The second storey of a bathhouse was a room where the menfolk, done with their bath, would drink tea and play go, the game of black and white stones. For a few coppers more you could go up. Retired old men and craftsmen from round about would sprawl there and idle the time away. That was the sort of place it was.

In one corner sat a young man I did not know, alone, looking as though he had no idea what to do with himself. His knees drawn neatly together. By any reckoning, the face of someone only just arrived in the city.

"Say, brother. Haven't seen your face before. First time in Edo, is it?"

When I spoke to him, the man gave a start and answered in a country accent.

"Y-yes, sir. I only came up last month… and I've not a soul I know here."

At that, one of the regulars cut in without missing a beat — an old botefuri, a peddler who hawks his wares from baskets slung on a shoulder-pole, his face flushed red from the bath.

"What's this now. Whoever heard of a man bringing his acquaintances along to the bathhouse? Strip bare in here, and everybody's your acquaintance."

A great laugh went up. The young man was all nerves, but the old fellow paid it no mind and thrust out his own tea-cup.

"Drink. In here, whether you're the sahai who manages the tenement or a peddler like me, once you're stripped bare there's no high nor low. That's the way of the bathhouse, that is."

I was fond of this sight.

Slip off your kimono, and you left your station and your title beside the bandai — the attendant's raised seat by the entrance. The master of such-and-such a house and the young fellow from the back tenements soaked in the same water and talked over tomorrow's weather. And once the stiffness had gone out of a man's shoulders like that, then, for the first time, he would fall to talking with whoever was beside him. Places where anyone at all could stand naked side by side — there were not so many of those.

That evening the young man had his cup filled by the old peddler, was taught by a retired man where he might find work, and before anyone knew it had thawed completely. His face gone a hazy cherry-blossom pink from the steam, he bowed his head again and again.

As he was leaving, from the foot of the stairs the man turned back toward us and said, in a bright voice —

"I'll be coming again tomorrow, and all… I mean — I'll come again tomorrow, too."

It must have been his first "see you tomorrow" in Edo. Somehow I felt glad of it, as though it were my own.

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The bathhouses, in time, grew markedly fewer.

Every house came to have its own bath, and people no longer troubled to gather. What is left today is only a handful of public baths, kept by those who feel a fondness for the good old things. Even that sight — the steam rising from a tall chimney — has become a rare thing altogether.

But that longing — for people to gather, naked, which is to say with their titles stripped off, in some warm place — has not gone out. It has only changed its shape and moved on: to the tavern, to the coffee-house, or to the gatherings held inside a screen.

Even now, I am fond, once in a while, of sinking into a great bath. An old habit of mine.

I sink slowly in, up to the shoulders, and let out a long breath — ah. Beside me, some stranger I have never met lets out, in just the same way, a breath of his own — ah. That one comfort, the way the hot water sinks into the skin — that alone, I think, has not changed by so much as a hair in a thousand years.

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