Hot baths were a luxury. Hot showers a necessity. In the bathhouses, pleasure melded into duty seamlessly. You were there to clean yourself, and you were allowed to enjoy it thoroughly.
I indulged myself whenever possible in the old wooden bathhouses. Stooped, old ladies with their folds of skins hanging like drapes over retired passages in between their soft, wobbly thighs. Young girls, lithe and limber, moving from showers to hot spring like a flock of pale, naked birds of paradise. I looked right through them. In the onsen, you were nothing but another faceless figure passing through the waters. Solid through liquid. You could rub shoulders with a stranger who bared her breasts unflinchingly, and pass a demure smile from one end of the row of shower cubicles to the other without averting your eyes. But bump into the same stranger on the streets, and if she had a button coming undone on her blouse, you would look away so as to not catch a glimpse of the bra that resolutely covered the breasts you still remembered the shape of.
It was a complete mystery to me, but one that begged no fathoming - the way we shed our shame like our clothes in the tatami-floored locker room. In my guilt-ridden world, where nakedness was akin to vulnerability, I welcomed this allegorical universe of complete acceptance, where women walked, talked, and laughed in security despite the insecurities only the shell of a woman can inflict upon the soul of the very same woman.
I kept to the corners, choosing the cubicle closest to the end in which to sponge down my lower body.  Every time I entered the hot spring, regardless of whether or not it was occupied or vacant, I played this game : For every ripple I set into motion, I was a disturbance to the balance of the world. The greater the radius of the ripple, the greater the destruction wrought. Once I slipped on the wet granite floor and fell into the water. Even though I was the only one in the entire bathhouse, I immediately cowered in the scalding waves sloshing loudly against the sides of the bath.
I'm sorry, I mouthed, I didn't mean to disturb.