Mama? Why do we go to the bathhouse when we have one of our own?
Because we are all equal when we are naked.
It wasn’t a sophisticated bathhouse. It didn’t have the outdoor baths or the cold baths or the salt baths. It was solely practical, a relic from a time when people didn’t have tubs of their own. There had been talk about the bathhouse being torn down for a new build. The owner was in his eighties now and the fire oven that fuelled the waters was difficult to manage. Haruka wanted to take Meiko before the inevitable happened. To the bathhouse their mother once loved, where she would steep herself in its hot waters and find a momentary peace.
They stoop beneath the cotton noren and enter the genkan, removing their shoes, placing them in the worn wooden cubby holes, locking them away with a weightless key. An old standing fan whirrs by the front desk, its body swaying with the effort. On the wall behind the counter hangs all the same framed pictures from when Haruka was a child: an ink drawing of a black-and-white cat, an old scene from a harbour, a faded photograph of the bathhouse in the seventies. The old man is there, his hair now colourless. He smiles cheerily at Haruka, but he doesn’t recognise her, which hurts more than she would have expected. She scans the tray of toiletries she used to love as a child, now faded and old-fashioned; the desire to possess all the little pink combs and hair nets still niggling away. She pays for the both of them, Meiko following her through to the right, onto the slick hinoki floors of the changing rooms. Haruka had already explained to Meiko that they would have to be naked. She had thought her sister would be uncomfortable with the exposure, embarrassed by the tradition—but Meiko undresses, pulling off her white tank top, her bra, without any sense of shyness. Haruka takes in the soft curve of her sister’s belly, the roundness of her bum, her puffier nipples, the hair dark like her own. It strikes her how clean their nakedness feels—the freedom of feeling natural next to someone for the first time in years.
They walk through the doors and into the tiled bathhouse, feet smacking against the wet. They sit on pastel-coloured plastic stoops and wash themselves. The steam rising, the sound of falling water running off their bodies and onto the old grouting.
Since the day of the box, Haruka had built a kind of mental dam between herself and her thoughts, employing a technique Satsuki, one of the older women at the Venus, had taught her. She had watched her in the makeup room, her left leg up on the vanity chair, waxing her legs into submission. Now and then, she would pause her explanation to rip at her dark hairs, then resume her telling as she plastered another layer of hot wax. She had told Haruka that when she was feeling anxious, she would focus in on the moment by noticing what was in front of her.
The wax, the table, the lightbulbs, you, my knee, this stupid hair I’ve missed . . . And you say to yourself I’m still alive. I’m okay right now in this moment. And that’s how I get through it.
For a while, Satsuki’s simple way of thinking had helped Haruka. Now, as she sits in front of the mirror, her body loosening under the warmth of the water, the mental dam she’d worked so hard to uphold, breaks.
As she washes herself, she thinks of her father. As she scrubs at her skin she wonders if he ever came into one of her clubs, knowing she was his daughter—herself completely unaware that the man scanning her cleavage was her long-lost dad. Was he sick like the ones she had been a sexual punching bag for? From what Baba had said about him, he had loved her mother. In the way greedy men love their mistresses, until they don’t. Until somewhere along the line a freak accident is regarded as a lucky blessing. Haruka knew this type of man. Where the death of a mistress is the big life event that makes him and his wife renew their wedding vows at a hotel resort in Hawaii, their adolescent daughter sheathed in a white chiffon dress, uncertain in her first pair of heels, throwing hibiscus petals at the feet of her mother. After the ceremony, in the soft lighting of the bathroom, pissing out his fourth mimosa, he’ll think of her as he wipes his urine from the toilet seat. He’ll think about how she’d always berate him for leaving the drips un-wiped, and he’ll thank Yuki for making him a better man, a better husband. He’ll throw the wet tissue in the basin and flush it down, along with his gratitude. And, later that evening, he’ll gaze out of his floor-to-ceiling windows, framed with billowing drapes, and he’ll ask himself how he got so lucky. His loyal, milk-skinned wife sleeping in bed, the undetected throes of passion he had with his mistress a thing of the past.
Haruka could see it all. She knew this person—sometimes she thought it was all she understood: the predictability of men. She knew her father because every man she had ever met at the clubs had been a doorway back to him. Dark corridors all turning in on themselves, leading to the same starting place. She had been searching for him all her life, under rotting logs, between the quivering thighs of strangers. She had already known him a thousand times over, at all the empty dinners and day trips, all the long drives to some destination picked out by someone else. And, now that the truth of him had come into startling clarity, she felt a strange sense of relief thickening her insides. Her father had been many things to her over the years, but he had never been clear. Now he was, and she felt profoundly disenchanted.
Haruka finally understood why her mother needed to immerse herself in the hot waters of the bathhouse. She too felt that same need. Haruka didn’t feel comforted by this realisation—she did not like knowing that her and her mother had been made to feel unclean. Instead, she found solace in a thought that had come to her as she had said goodnight to her grandmother the night before. For all the injury her father had left in his absence, for all his misuse of Mama, he had never known their love. He might have forced his way in, but whatever he had tried to take was nothing compared to the depth Mama had willingly given Haruka. Her father had only scratched the surface of her. Barged his way in and lost the one thing worth having: the privilege of ever being loved. By her mother and by herself.
She walks to the hottest bath, to the right beneath the lotus flower. She steps into the water, the liquid scolding her frigid feet, the water on her ankles burning the skin. She fights the urge to pull herself from it, even though every part of her feels on fire. She forces herself, inch by inch, the scorching painful but necessary. As she steeps herself further in—her calves, then her thighs, then her hips, then her waist—she feels an undoing. Her body surrendering until she is all heat.
She opens her eyes and sees Meiko wading into the waters. Her naked body wreathed against the sunlight pouring in from the high windows. This time she does not notice Meiko’s differences and similarities. Only the simple joy she feels watching her sister walk towards her. Meiko’s mouth slightly open, breathing in at the shock of the heat, eyes on Haruka, a smile forming in the corners of her mouth, an echoed laugh escaping as the water hits her hips. This body made of the same mother, who knew some of her pain, if not the entirety of it. A variation of the same song. Someone she did not need to explain anything to, not because words were impossible, but because they were unnecessary. She watches her sister submerge herself next to her, eyes closed, singing Mama’s tune under her breath. She notices a plaster across her wrist, faint little scars across Meiko’s arms like inverted notches in wood, and Haruka knows that she too is washing away the filth of others. That she too can finally rest and come clean.
*
That night beneath clouds,
They laugh and light the sparklers.
Grandfather’s promise.