“Don’t mind the Vuitton. It’s fake from Hong Kong,” she boasted as I lifted her pair of heavy cases into the trunk. “I didn’t catch your name, young lady.”
“Rei Shimura,” I said slowly, as I always did growing up in the United States.
“Is that Rae with an e, or Ray with a y?”
“Neither. It’s a Japanese name that rhymes with the American ones.”
“Hey, Rei! It rhymes. I’m Mrs. Chapman. Marcelle,” she added as an afterthought. Still, there was no question I was to call her Mrs., just as I knew she wanted me to carry her bags. She chatted all the way to Minshuku Yogetsu, which turned out to be considerably less poetic-looking than its name, which meant “night moon.” Pollution had stained its stucco exterior, and windows covered by dark brown shutters made the house look like its eyes were closed to the world. Part of the garden had been converted into a parking lot holding two Toyotas: one a rusty Town Ace van, and the other a sleek black Windom. Given the high price I’d paid for my room, I could guess which one belonged to the innkeepers.
Mrs. Chapman strode past me and flung the front door open. “Yoo-hoo! Anyone around?”
A slender woman in her forties with short hair and an equally no-nonsense expression emerged from a side room and slid onto her knees, bowing her head deeply to the floor.
“Welcome. It was so rude of me not to be here to open the door for you.” I recognized the voice as that of Mrs. Yogetsu, the innkeeper I had made the reservation with. Behind the courteous words, I sensed a reproach to us for having barged in. When I apologized and told her about the late train, her face tightened even more; she’d caught my slight American accent.
“You are traveling together? Surely you will prefer to have adjoining rooms?” Her offering was bland, but having experienced it many times before, I caught the sentiment underneath: Keep the foreigners together, separate from the rest of us.
“There’s no need, absolutely no need at all.” I was falling over myself. “I actually met this lady on the train.”
We exchanged our shoes for house slippers, at her direction, and Mrs. Chapman painstakingly filled out the guest register while I glanced around. The place was immaculate and Zen simple, its walls hung with a few exquisite scrolls. The floor was covered by straw tatami mats ending at a sunken hearth where a fire burned with a low blue flame. Above it dangled an antique cast-iron kettle. Late nineteenth-century, I thought, peering at it.
I was impressed again as Mrs. Yogetsu led us past a handsome tansu chest decorated with a slightly unbalanced-looking New Year’s arrangement of pine and flowering plum.
“How beautiful. Do you study flower arranging?” Maybe I could flatter her into a friendlier mood.
“As a matter of fact, I teach. I’m a sensei”
I was startled. Sensei was an honorific title used to describe teachers or physicians, but was too pompous to use when introducing oneself. In describing my own work, I always used kyoushi, the humble word meaning tutor.
The bedroom Mrs. Yogetsu offered me was simple and extremely small, decorated with little more than a tea table and two cushions for sitting. The closet held all the bedding plus a fresh blue and white cotton yukata, the guest robe I could wear to the communal bath. The back wall of the closet had another sliding door opening into the next room. How the next-door guest and I would keep our possessions separate, I wasn’t sure.
I was dying to soak my tired, stiff body. Mrs. Yogetsu pointed the way down a back staircase. As I gathered together my toiletries, I heard new arrivals downstairs: a low-pitched woman’s voice speaking decorously and the more forceful growl of an older man. Another male interrupted, speaking some variation of British English, his vowels more drawn out than the BBC accents I’d grown accustomed to on the short-wave.
I hung a WOMEN ONLY sign on the blank bathroom door and entered a tidy dressing room with a glass door leading to the long, wide, sunken bath. Hefting the large plastic covers off the tub, I dipped a foot in. Like all baths in Japan, this one was oppressively over-heated.
A shower area including soap, water buckets, and wooden stools was an unspoken command to wash carefully before entering the tub, which would be shared by others. I knew all about public bath etiquette because my apartment had no bath, forcing me to travel to a public facility when I couldn’t stand my trickling shower anymore. My neighborhood bathhouse was always crowded and had just a partial wall between the men’s and women’s sections; hearing old men talking two feet away did little for my relaxation.
This bath was mine alone and was big enough to swim in. I rested my head on its smooth wooden edge, remembering childhood summers at the pool, races from shallow to deep end that left me breath less. My body was something I didn’t think about then. I wasn’t a girl, I was a streamlined fish. Looking down at my small breasts breaking the water’s surface, I evaluated how life in Japan had changed me. My legs had become sinewy from endless walking, and not being able to afford cheese or wine had flattened my stomach. The deprivation diet really worked.