A fuzzy feeling warned me I was close to overheating. I hauled myself out and rested until my dizziness subsided. I poured a few buckets of cool water over myself before slipping back into the cauldron. It was still blistering hot, so I cracked open the window over the bath for a rush of frosty air. I heard the bath door opening and turned around, drawing my knees together modestly and preparing to nod hello to the newcomer. I was hoping for the Japanese woman with the lovely voice.
The person who came in was a tall, athletically-built man with reddish blond hair. Also naked, but now fumbling to cover himself with a hand towel. His green eyes appeared stricken in the brief moment they met mine, just before I scrambled deeper underwater for protection.
“Wrong bathroom, please leave!” I realized after the fact that I was screaming in Japanese.
“Sumimasen, excuse me!” he shouted back in the strange, textured accent I had recently overheard. “It, ah, doesn’t say anything on the door—”
“It says women!” I shouted in English.
“I thought these baths were communal—”
“That doesn’t mean coed! What do you think this is, a soapland?”
His face reddened, giving every indication that he knew the sleazy sex baths where prostitutes used their bodies like sponges.
“I’m sorry, I meant nothing—” The man’s continuing apology was cut off in midstream as the door banged shut.
My heart continued to jackhammer as I heard sounds of dressing going on in the other room, some stumbling and the zip of a fly. When I was sure he had left, I shot out of the bath and tied on my yukata. I exited just as Mrs. Chapman came down the hall tied up like a giant package in a yellow chenille bathrobe.
“Be careful while you bathe. The door doesn’t lock.” My voice shook.
“But the manager told me it would be ladies only.” Mrs. Chapman scrunched up her forehead. “That sign on the door. What does it mean?”
“See this kanji; it looks like a woman kneeling, doesn’t it? In Japanese, the word for woman is written as one who serves.”
“What’s a kanji?”
“A pictogram.” At her blank expression, I tried again. “The Japanese took their system of writing from China, using pictorial symbols to represent word meanings. This is the man’s symbol.” I picked up the wooden sign the intruder should have known about. “What does it look like to you?”
“A blockhead on legs.”
I stifled a laugh and explained, “The square is supposed to represent a rice field, and the legs underneath it represent power. So it literally means power in the rice field, which is what men did in the old agrarian culture.” Next, I showed her the sign for family and explained that mixed-sex bathing was considered healthy within the family unit.
“People are perverted here,” Mrs. Chapman said with a hint of excitement. “Did you ever notice you can see straight into the men’s toilet at the train stations?”
“You’re supposed to look away and pretend the urinals aren’t there,” I scolded, feeling like a hypocrite. The man had offered rather good views during his struggle to get out of the bathroom. Views I should have closed my eyes against, but didn’t.
An hour later, I sat with Mrs. Chapman in the living room waiting for dinner. She had a scrapbook out with postcards of Asia. As she droned on about her favorite capital cities, my attention wandered over to the hearth where a middle-aged Japanese couple were warming their hands.
The man was pure Tokyo, wearing an expensively-cut navy suit and what looked like a permanent sneer. I dismissed him instantly as a salaryman, one of the essential office executives who filled urban Japan with an aura of cigarettes, Scotch, and exhaustion. The woman kneeling beside him was perhaps a decade younger, her long curtain of glossy black hair tied back with a silk scarf. Her eyes were rounder than mine, maybe she’d had super-expensive “Fresh Eyes” plastic surgery.
What riveted me was the fact that her ivory dress was made by Chanel—I quickly discerned from the buttons that it was the real thing. And her jewelry was Japan’s best, a double-strand choker of gleaming pearls with Mikimoto’s trademark gold butterfly clasp. The outfit was too expensive for a typical salaryman’s wife, she’d probably bought everything overseas at a discount. Maybe they were simply rich, the sort who filled the party page of the Tokyo Weekender, the bi-weekly tabloid for expatriates I studied as closely as my antiques journals. As much as I scoffed at Tokyo’s social lions, I was fascinated by them. This woman wasn’t someone I recognized, but she seemed familiar. A memory of the bell-like voice I’d heard before my bath came back.