Friday, March 27, 2009

 Well, we checked out of our Tokyo hotel this morning and boarded the “Odoriko” Express train for Shuzenji, an old and famous onsen, or hot springs, town 2 hours southwest of Tokyo. It’s called “Odoriko,” or Dancing Girl, for the famous short story by Nobelist Yasunari Kawabata called “The Dancing Girl of Izu.” Shuzenji is located in the center of the Izu Peninsula and is famous for being the stage-set for various bloody family infighting among the Kamakura shogun families of the 12^th to 14^th centuries. These stories include a mother ordering the assassination of her own son, and another of a brother betrayed, imprisoned in the temple, and who later committed seppuku, or was poisoned by lacquer in his ofuro, or bath.

 In addition, Kobo Daishi, a famous Buddhist priest, supposedly founded the Shuzenji temple in town and caused a hot spring to erupt from the ground at the spot where he saw a young boy bathing his father’s feet, trying to heal his illness. (The spring, called Tokko-no-Yu, is being rebuilt in the center of the river that runs through town, so the entire stream bed is torn up –not very picturesque, but it will be nice when it is done.)

 Much later, in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, Shuzenji became a favorite haunt for various famous writers and artists, including Natsume Soseki and Kawabata.

 Enter a 21^st century writer, Baruto, or as we like to call him, Rick-ruto, after the massive Estonian sumo wrestler who is either tossed on his ear from the ring, or who literally picks up his opponents, carries them to the side of the ring, and deposits them unceremoniously outside the sumo ring. Baruto is a little hairy, a little easy to mock, and Will and I like to tease Rick that Baruto is his alter ego.

 So we arrived at this hot springs town this morning, and left our bags at an old ryokan dating back more than a century. All of the buildings are national cultural assets, which means among other things, they are old. And cold. We toured the town, its temples, shrines, gift shops and tombs of the various slain Minamoto family members, and then settled into the ryokan for our first dip in the hot springs. We went to a private “family” bath in the basement, where I could show the boys how to bathe and not get soap in the onsen. The drill is you bathe sitting down on little plastic stools, get totally clean, rinse off and only then do you enter the communal hot bath. Well, Rick got it almost right, except he tried to shower standing up, and then, God forbid, squeezed his washcloth onto the rocks that flowed into the hot onsen. I mean, that’s like, super bad. But what everyone after us doesn’t know, won’t hurt them, right?

 Then I had to stop another disaster when Rick wanted to use the tokonoma as a luggage rack. The raised tatami matted area called the tokonoma is a special area of the room, which features artwork such as a scroll and ikebana, or flower arrangement. Oops. Not a luggage rack.

  Our room is a large tatami-mat room, complete with attached private bath and toilet, and a little sitting area looking out on a koi-filled pond. Once we’d settled in, had our bath and were lounging in our robes, Rick-ruto pulled his gravest faux pas ever. I’d told him perhaps five times in the days leading up to the trip about the “bathroom slippers,” plastic slippers that are used in and stay in the toilet area of a bathroom. I’d been afraid he’d go answer his door at the hotel or something and have on the “potty slippers,” which would be super bad. Anyhow, I’m sitting in the tatami mat room and here comes Rick, holding the potty slippers in his bare hands, saying “Someone forgot their slippers in the potty,” implying Will had made a big transgression. I screamed, “No not the potty slippers!” Ok, so I’m being dramatic, but it was incredibly funny. And it showed how much Rick doesn’t listen to me when I’m talking.

 Will has been loving the ryokan experience and looks quite adorable in his little yukata robe and tanzen jacket. He grooved on being served dinner in our room, which was a long and elaborate meal. Rick was slightly, but not totally, freaked by the grilled pregnant fish full of eggs (he may not have known they were eggs and I didn’t have the heart to tell him, though Will noted they tasted like the tobiko on sushi); but it was the other grilled fish head, which was quite delicious, that nearly got all of us. Rick asked Will if he wanted the eye, to which Will answered that he was adventurous. However, when Rick popped the eye out with his chopsticks and it went squirting through the air, all of our gross-out meters went off. The eyeball was not eaten.

  Whenever we couldn’t finish something, it seemed to disappoint the woman who looks after us here. They have an army of kimino-clad women whom Will has dubbed “tea travelers,” because they can been seen hurrying down the corridors bringing tea to guests. Rick doesn’t want to disappoint our tea traveler, a lovely woman who serves us meals in our room and makes up our beds, so he is planning to throw what we can’t eat at tomorrow nights dinner to the carp outside. He’s just kidding, of course, but the image got us all to laughing. And then Rick said he was going to take the video camera to the all-men’s communal bath, and tell them he was going to make a Youtube video of the men’s bath,  and then he would cannonball into the onsen, and ask all the other men why they weren’t wearing their potty slippers, which being plastic are waterproof and thus perfect for the onsen. OK, maybe you had to be here, but we were all rolling on the tatami mats weeping with laughter. Perhaps we need some sleep. But much to Rick’s dismay, we have to wait for our tea traveler to lay out our futon so we can sleep. Things are tough all over.