Editor’s Note: Hello from a very busy Portland summer! While the sunshine is making its brief appearance in my rainy town, I’m putting some favorites from last year back in the spotlight. Don’t forget, Change of Heart is always open for submissions—and we pay. ☀️
I was an hour north of Tokyo when the onsen took hold. This was the farthest I’d been from the city—I was staying with my poet sensei in Bunkyo, a central district—since we took a bus out to Yamanashi to try and coax the clouds away from the rough snowskin at the top of Mt. Fuji. Sensei and I had gone to onsen in Yamanashi, and while the view was great, the soaking tub was a stainless steel rectangle inside a touristy motel. It was good because it was my first time, and because time with sensei was always good, but I had no idea what the real thing felt like.
Imagine a painting of a rocky hillside blackened by night, carved out with steaming pools of varying sizes and shapes. Out of one inky pool oranges emerge bobbing, with a man holding one up to the nose of a laughing child. Most mouths are closed in silence, but some boys are clustered for a soft conversation. There are chairs with some male bodies in them, washcloths saddling their heads as is the custom. Inside the building are more pools, some with jets, some shaped into the tile in a laydown waveform reminiscent of a folded-out recliner. Everywhere flesh and movement—the jiggle under the jets, the transit from one temperature or type of tub to another.
The focal point of the painting, however, revolves around two scenes separated by a small walkway. In one, a single-serving outdoor tub that looks like an oversized wooden bucket holds a father and his younger-than-puberty but older-than-toddlerhood son. The tub holds them both, and the father holds his boy, too, their legs dangling out the side without a muscle flexed. They’ve melted into the water and steam, and into each other. It’s night and the moon watches over them with a cool, misty breeze.
Then, a gaijin, a foreign white man, his body much longer, fatter, and hairier than every other body in the scene—and there are hundreds—lies prone on flat, black rocks heated by a skim of hot water. He appears to be moonbathing, his eyes seemingly closed and his arms out in an upside down V. But in the painting there’s a sort of Mona Lisa effect—if you walk past it in a certain light, the big hairy white man’s eyes are half open, staring directly into the moon. Its light is reflected in his eyes.
I had been in Japan for 10 days at this point, and was leaving the day after the next. A few days earlier I had woken up early, around 5 am, to hear sensei coughing through the walls (he’s 85 with bad lungs) and the giant crows haw haw hawing in the playground outside the window. Lying there, floating between states of consciousness, I felt an invisible pull on my belly, an uncomfortable lateral stretching of my diaphragm. The diaphragm is the elevator for the lungs—it’s an up-and-down machine, not a side-to-side machine.
After the pull became almost nauseous there was a sort of pop! And I felt it—some unseen snap of a cord: between me and “back home,” between me and a stable sense of identity. Between who I had been when I got there and who I was becoming. I was having a change of belly, y’all. And it felt weird.
Now, in the first person place of that previous scene, moonbathed and steaming over quicksilver water, my culturally cordless belly, and the pale hairy body attached to it, both big* and weightless in the night air, was having an experience I am almost positive I would never (could never?) have in the U.S. And that little boy was having an experience with his father, vulnerable and untensed in a crowded space, unavailable to him in my home country. Later I would wonder, why? Why could I only be this exposed and calm, surrounded by other settled exposed male bodies, outside of my home country? What did it mean to be naked in Japan?
Well, a lot of things, it turns out. And I’m not gonna front like I’m some new being just because I spent a week and a half in a place halfway around the world from my home. But I did wake up to the limitations of my own culture, and, ultimately, how those limitations are inscribed, not by something named “capitalism” or “patriarchy” or even racism—as real an impact those things have on Americans, they aren’t it for me. My belly tells me something else, my nose smells something more rank—a mystery meat living in the refrigerator of our states so long we’ve habituated ourselves around it, even going so far as to say this stench is actually beneficial, and a more worthy freshener than an orange box of baking soda. What’s rotten in America, what’s rotten in me, is the very impulse to deodorize. The greatest stench, or one of them anyway, I've now come to believe, is our wish as Americans to take the scent off everything.
You can take the metaphor a lot of different ways—I’m thinking of the scent of the trail, specifically the many trails forced into being by the many tribes whose lands we stole. How that trail smells of old blood and the unending misery of humans forced to confront the fact that they would forever be homeless from a land they felt to be just another of their limbs. More than that, though, when I saw that father holding his boy. In that moment, that perfectly uncreepy male moment, I felt the longing for space for the basic tenderness that can exist between people when we don’t have the belief that bodies are basically impure, that hearts are prone to do evil unless they are guided properly. When bodies are allowed scent and sense.
This naked moment was built from the ground up, which is why, as I reflected up at the moon, I was moved to join my own tears to the water skim supporting me. The onsen, its great watery mass of silent fraternal feeling between strangers, absolutely obliterated me.
What if water started pure, had a right to be that way? What if the air carried the divine spirit in it, and should be honored as such? I’m not a Shintoist, and few Japanese apparently call themselves exclusively that. You can’t, really—Shintoism isn’t something you believe in, but something you do, from what little I’ve experienced of it. Most Japanese folks who do affiliate with a religion call themselves Buddhist, but often go to both Buddhist and Shintoist services. Even my sensei, a man whose existence is rooted in the nationalistic sweeps of the 20th century, who was born on land called China again but at the time was annexed by Imperial Japan and who was eight years old when U.S. warplanes incinerated two cities with atomic bombs—even a man who has had his religious guts blown out of him has said that while he doesn’t believe in Shintoism’s belief that all things contain a kami, or divine being, there are cells in his body that still do.
It’s funny what the body knows, isn’t it? Standing on a crowded train one day in Tokyo, really pressed against the bodies, enough to smell breath and skin and feel flesh and bone, the cells in my body revealed their beliefs, too. I began to tense up, tried to center my focus on my back pocket without moving to make sure my wallet was still there, my pulse peaking and my arteries hardening for greater blood flow (my systolic pressure as I age keeps creeping skyward—I’m at about 95 and rising). My prefrontal cortex kept narrating back to me all the stories of items, including wallets full of money, getting returned within 24 hours—all you have to do is report the item to a station agent. Wallets get lost on trains in Japan, not stolen. Or rarely so. And yet my body was ready for a threat. If not a robbery, maybe a loud noise, a breakdancer trying to score some change with an acrobatic performance that puts limbs claustrophobically close to face at high speeds. The cells were talking, and their tongue was curled in fear. Watch out! If you see something, say something!! I could hear fainter deeper echoes… Why don’t you keep your doors locked? Why do you keep your wallet in your car? You must be nuts to keep your windows down in this neighborhood.
Onsen is about more than just soaking your cares away, I think. It’s not a form of self-care. There’s too much ceremony involved, and too many others present for it. You eat, usually with others, to nourish your body, then you strip, to expose your body, and then there are steps: before the baths there is a whole network of sitdown showers where you bathe your body before entering the clean water of the onsen tubs. This fascinates me: the water used by the individual to soap up their body is not as pure as that water communally shared by bodies, and out of respect to the pure water, which in a few onsens is still fed by mountain hot springs, you clean your body before entering it. You are returning your body to its purest state to merge with other pure bodies in the pure water. There is a smell in the onsen, especially indoors (and of course in the orange-filled tubs), but it’s the smell of water and wind. It’s the smell of our source, what guides us to remember that there is always connective tissue between us, whether invisible air, lambent water, or your child’s vertebrae tucked into the blanket of your belly.
The belief that we are fundamentally bad, a belief we Americans carry in our marrow, toward ourselves and others, such that our bloodstream is filled with hemoglobic terror of the evil others are about to commit—this, I now believe, is one of the fuels for the wildfire of systems that oppress in this country. My body, my big hairy white male body, is dirty, and nothing can purify it but the fire of fear.
I remember when I first read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time in college in the late ‘90s. Back then Baldwin was not mainstream fare, and I never would have gotten to him if I hadn’t been lucky enough to have been at my very historical, very rural, very white liberal arts college when they hired their first full-time Black literature professor. Jacqueline Jones, from Brooklyn, wrote her doctorate about Baldwin. I have no idea what or who she saw in me—I often wonder what she’d think of me now—but for whatever reason she told me to read this skinny book by this skinny man who left America on a steam ship for Paris at the age of 24 because he was Black and because he was gay and so would forever be in mortal danger in his home country. What struck me in The Fire Next Time was the passage, after a seemingly random rant about the preponderance of Wonder Bread in the U.S. in 1963, about sensuality. He is quick to define sensuality away from sexuality. He means it in the literal sense: an investment in, a treasuring of the senses. In the passage he indicts white America for its lack of sensuality, and tells us that, until we can find our way back to the pleasure of another body through our senses rather than our ideas, we will never recover from the guilty innocence of lives lived on the backs of bodies broken by their having been rendered, like so much fat from bacon, into a commodity to be bought and sold.
It can’t be that simple, can it? Rewire life through the senses and poof! Instant antidote to transphobia, racism, misogyny. And yet when I see body positivity’s reclamation of its own flesh by woman-identifying people, when I see two ladies lying on neighboring yoga mats before a class, hand in hand, gazing into each other’s eyes, practically eating each other’s words with their senses, I feel the pushback. I feel new cells being born, even as technology disembodies us long enough to become products.
And I look around for the men—I open my arms and mouth and let out one of Whitman’s barbaric yawps. I open my shirt collar, I feel proud of my middle-aged man belly, its softness holding womanly secrets and gifts like a womb. A few weeks ago I smoked some weed with my bodyworker, and during a deep massage of my pectoral muscles I felt it, irrevocably: the beauty, the power, and the annoying visibility of having women’s breasts.
I do all these things. I stand wide-eyed, ready for the onsen’s watery world to visit. And a desert opens up before me.
I’m hopelessly straight, but I think it’s about time I follow the words Allen Ginsberg used to end his poem “America” and put my queer shoulder to the wheel. Men, especially you, cishet men—I’m coming for you. I’m dressed in a Civil War reenactor’s uniform, ready to hold a long time, arm in arm, for a daguerrotype, I’ve got tea and cookies, and I have no idea who won the sportsball tournament last night. My body count is in the single digits. I think only respecting women I find attractive is disgusting. I think a healthy, meaty woman is hot. I’ll go down on a woman with a bush. And when I hug you we won’t tap shoulder blades. We’ll hold each other long enough to cry, like the only character I really identified with in Fight Club, played, aptly, by the late Meatloaf: Bob. His full name is Robert Paulson, an ex-bodybuilder whose use of steroids led to testicular cancer, which led to testicular removal, which led to a hormonal imbalance and the growth of what the narrator calls “bitch tits.” He later wins a fight with the same narrator by hugging him into submission.
I’ll swallow this poison of body hatred. I’ll swallow it until I grow a new umbilicus, until I can feel the cells in my blood flood me with something new. Until I can feel another man in my arms, and grow into the maddening discomfort that arises from that intimacy. Until I can smell their bad deodorant, get chafed by their beard stubble. Until I can believe that my body wasn’t built for impurity, and neither was yours.
*I used fat to describe myself in the third person because a) that's often how I see myself (which is I hope fodder for a future change of heart essay) and b) how I imagined Japanese people saw me while I was there. It was a major goal to lose weight before I got there to take up less space, but when I arrived it turned out I make the most sense at six feet one inch, 200 pounds.