Sento moments

Neck deep in the hot tub I contemplate people. A man washing himself slowly puts on soap with a sound like his skin is on fire, a light hiss for every movement. An old man shaves with great care and then puts his stool back against the wall with equal reverence. A father teaches his son how to scrub, demonstrating each action with gestures larger than usual. Another father and son enter quietly, ten and forty, perhaps, and bathe next to each other barely speaking at all.

A well-tattooed man in his thirties winces at the medium tub, tips into it gingerly. Later he is in the cool tub calmly relaxing. For each of us, I think, some things are difficult. In the opposite corner of the bath house an older man sits neck deep in the tea tub, 42 degrees C, letting the scented water pull sweat out of his brow. He too winces, but does not move.

In the last year the sento has become a place of peace, an odd space for thinking time for this boy from upstate New York. On off nights, when 5’s is in the women’s side, I sit in the hot water until my brain starts to melt and consider things. Then, half melted, I sit in the cold tub until my body begins to shiver. And repeat. The process is elucidative, and lately in the meta sense. While I often work through the problems of the day, or things I have been meaning to reflect on, sometimes around rotation three I can focus on the act, on how these tubs in this quiet part of Tokyo are one of the place I’m comfortable enough, and at peace enough, to contemplate.

On weekends and at odd hours for all of us I talk to former colleagues, to professional contacts from one life or another. These are good calls, people I treasure, and I’m glad to see their faces and catch up on their journeys. I am glad to share some laughter. We hear each other’s stories and watch each other’s faces for a bit until we’re simply talking again, caught up to where we need to be to discuss things, to discuss what we’re trying to do. These are the conversations that come back to me in the sento, body boiled and chilled, with still a few minutes to go before bedtime. In these hours I can at last think about the conversations, about where people are trying to end up.

“I want to be a failed novelist in Europe,” an American friend tells me one morning. It’s a wonderful description of a dream. It’s so dear to me, to someone who spends so much time writing, to someone who spends so much time abroad. We joke about how job titles weren’t a goal we were raised with, though we have been caught aiming for them at times. We joke about how work can be aspirational but shouldn’t be defining, having spent long evenings together working at what we thought would make a startup successful. Sometimes it’s the pain that brings out the truth, or that makes us question what we’ve been doing. Sometimes it’s the memory that, while hard, those were happy times, and that we were excited to strive to create something with a group of people.

In the hot part of the baths again I think about theater, about how my long-ago passion was so much built on the same threads. Theater, I used to tell people, was about bringing humans together to build something unique. We aimed to create something that would only exist for a short time, with those specific humans. And once it was done we were inevitably sad to have lost that feeling, and would try again if given the chance.

The same truths describe startups. And that realization gives our calls more comfort. We all miss something that was, even though it was built to be missed, even though success brings the end of the part we enjoyed.

I watch an older man shave carefully around his nose, in the delicate way so common to humans wielding sharp instruments near their skin. Listening, I realize I can no longer hear 5’s singing in the women’s half. Time to extract my self from this heat, then, and head towards bedtime.