If You Follow Me (35 page)

After a long day of surreptitious snowboarding, we enjoyed a blissful soak at
Mawaki Onsen
. Following the bath we got
akasuri
, a form of Korean exfoliation that takes place in a steamy back room where women in black bras and underwear rub you down from head to toe with scouring pads. If this sounds remotely sexy, it's not. Within minutes, your skin sloughs off in grimy piles, revealing a painfully raw undercoat. But it was fun to lie on a gurney alongside Chikako, two naked pink giants, sharing a joke that needed no translation.

The bathroom of the house that I rented in Japan was extremely unappealing. Mushrooms actually sprouted in the grout. So I usually bathed at the end of the block, at a public bathhouse that had one tub for men and one for women. Divided only by a cloth partition, you could hear chatting from the other side. In the evening, people would walk over from their houses wearing pajamas and carrying plastic tubs of shampoo and razors and soap, and towels slung over their shoulders. While my neighbors and I didn't always coexist in perfect harmony, I loved participating in this local ritual, sitting at the wall of showers alongside grandmothers giving each other shoulder rubs and mothers scrubbing down their children before bed. I felt accepted, unexceptional in my nudity. Stripped down, we're all sort of funny-looking and gorgeous, lumpy and perfect, more alike than alien.

Author's Picks: Favorite Books Set in Japan (plus one movie)

Out
, by Natsuo Kirino

It's ridiculously hard to throw away anything unusual in Japan without attracting attention. When a woman who works the graveyard shift at a
bento
box lunch plant kills her abusive husband, she enlists the help of three female coworkers to dispose of the body. The ladies almost get away with it. This noir thriller is fascinating for its depiction of the lives of working-class women in contemporary Japan and their uneasy friendships.

The Elephant Vanishes
and
Norwegian Wood
, by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami never gives lengthy setting descriptions, yet Japan is clearly both backdrop and subject of his fiction. His story collection,
The Elephant Vanishes
, includes “Sleep,” about a housewife who suddenly doesn't need any. At first it seems like a gift—she stays up all night reading novels—but she soon becomes robotic and disaffected. Murakami always blurs the line between the real and imagined. His novel,
Norwegian Wood
, is a moving coming-of-age story set in Tokyo at the end of the sixties. The plot is plausible, but it definitely shares the same uncanny sensibility.

Fear and Trembling
and
Tokyo Fiancée
, by Amelie Nothomb

The Belgian author Amelie Nothomb spent her early childhood in Japan, then returned as a young woman. These experiences inspired several short novels. In
Fear and Trembling
, Amelie goes to work as a corporate translator in Tokyo and enters an almost sadomasochistic relationship with her female supervisor, who demotes her to bathroom janitor to humiliate her. It's an interesting window into Japanese office life and a fresh take on DeSade. The more recent
Tokyo
Fiancée
describes a perfect yet doomed romantic relationship between Amelie and a young Japanese man.

My Year of Meats
, by Ruth Ozeki

The narrator of this hilarious novel is a purple-haired, six-foot-tall Japanese American woman who works for a Japanese reality TV show sponsored by the American beef export lobby. Disgusted to discover the corruption and greed at the heart of the meat industry, she starts filming exposés instead of puff pieces. The book also follows a repressed Japanese housewife moved by the show to transform her life. Ozeki used to work on Japanese reality shows funded by corporate sponsors like Phillip Morris. She has unique insight into Japanese culture, as well as how it feels as an artist to sell out.

The Pillow Book of Lady Sei Shonagon
, by Sei Shonagon

Sei Shonagon was a court lady in tenth-century Japan who allegedly received a bunch of notebooks from the empress, which she used to jot down reflections, observations, and lists. Her insights still ring true one thousand years later. Things that give an unclean feeling: the inside of a cat's ear. Annoying things: thinking of something to add to a letter after having sent it. Embarrassing things: parents cooing over an ugly child. Pleasing things: finding a large number of tales one has not read before or acquiring the second volume of a tale whose first volume one has enjoyed.

The Pearl Diver
, by Jeff Talarigo

When a cut on a pearl diver's hand fails to heal, she is diagnosed with leprosy and—in keeping with the Japanese laws of the time—her name is expunged from her family registry and she is banished to an island leprosarium. This novel about being shunned manages to be tragic but not grim. Despite her constricted circumstances, the pearl diver finds beauty and creates
meaningful relationships. In spare and lovely prose, Talarigo draws a chilling parallel to the treatment in Japan of AIDS patients.

Naomi
, by Junichiro Tanizaki

This is Japan's
Lolita
, at least in its setup. A man in his thirties can't stop thinking about a fifteen-year-old girl from a lower socioeconomic class. Motivated by a love of all things “modern” and Western, he persuades her to move in with him in an unconventional arrangement where she will not be subservient in any way. Like Lolita, young Naomi has depths, life experience, and powers of manipulation beyond what her older lover imagines.

Tokyo: A Certain Style
, text and photographs by Kyoichi Tsuzuki

The documentary photographer Kyoichi Tsuzuki wanted to document the way people really live in one of the most magical and congested cities on earth. So he got the keys to the apartments of Tokyo-ites from all walks of life and paid surprise visits to photograph the clutter crammed into tiny spaces. Flipping through this book satisfies my curiosity to see into people's private lives, and makes me feel better about my own messiness.

Kitchen
, by Banana Yoshimito

The main character in this strange and sweet novel is a young girl who is all alone in the world until she meets a boy who works at a flower shop and happens to have a transsexual father. Like Murakami, Yoshimoto writes fables set in the here and now.

After Life
, a movie directed by Hirokazu Koreeda

Anyone with an interest in Japan is bound to fall in love with this moving, melancholy movie. It opens on a group of people of different ages shuffling into a facility that looks like a Japanese public school. These people have recently died, and they now have one week to choose a single
“best memory” from their lives, which the staff at this facility will then recreate on film (using B-movie props like cotton puff clouds) for them to reenter for eternity.
After Life
is poignantly understated. No one rails against death, even as they quietly grieve what they've lost. There are rules even in the afterlife, and for the most part even the dead obey them.

Cover design by Robin Bilardello

Cover photograph of the flowers by Tohoku Color Agency/Getty Images

Cover illustration by Dan-ah Kim