Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

A geothermal shaft of such heat ran under Wakkanai that one recreation in the frozen town was the community onsen, or hot spring. The water was not just scalding hot but laden with beneficial salts and minerals.

For the experience, and because I ached from all the travel, I caught a bus and took the fifteen-minute ride to the spa at the Onsen Dome, on the snowy shore just west of town. It was a Sunday. I discovered that poaching in the onsen was the main weekend activity in winter Wakkanai. And like so much in Japan—mealtime, playtime, hospitality, gift giving—it was formalized in a sequence of rituals: the changing room, the shower, the bathhouse, the spa, the hot springs—the progression from pool to pool—and at last the unwinding in lounge chairs afterwards. For some, this post-hot-spring activity involved drinking beer and smoking.

I rented a towel. I was handed slippers and a robe. I bought a ticket. All this was $5 or so. I went to the men's wing of the onsen. The main attraction was the large thermal room, with four very hot pools, some of them reddish with minerals, one steaming in the open air on a snowy balcony.

Naked Japanese men—young, old, middle-aged, with smooth and somewhat crepe-like skin; hairless, bent over, muscular, quite fat, very skinny, all sorts. In some ways it was like the popular impression of a Roman bath, not just a healthy activity but a social one, like a club that was also a big stew, the men walking around and chatting, companion-ably talking as they sat up to their necks in hot water, a damp towel neatly arranged on their head. The large windows on one side faced the snowy shore and the sea, on the other side the icy Wakkanai hills.

A naked man in a whirling bath smiled at me and said, "Horosho?" taking me for a Russian.

Outside on the balcony the steaming pool of hot water was bubbling and throwing up such a volume of mineral salts that they accumulated in a cakey thickness at the rim—this big tureen set in the snow. The air temperature was well below zero, but the water was so hot it didn't matter.

I was sitting in the outdoor pool when the door flew open and two children, a girl and a boy, ran through the snow at the edge and leaped in, laughing and splashing. A young man, who had to be their father, followed them. This was interesting. Though the sections of the spa were divided—men on one side, women on the other—children were welcome on both sides. And the small girl, a water baby of perhaps eight or nine, was absolutely unashamed, playing with her little brother, in and out of the pool, while the father called out and encouraged them.

She was approaching the age, and certainly had the look, of the object of desire in manga comics—a big-eyed sprite in pigtails. But no one—the pool held about eight men—seemed to take much notice of her: her beauty, the way she skipped through the snow and jumped into the bubbling pool; her agility in climbing out streaming with water, vapor rising from her cherubic body, her chafed and reddened buttocks, her face framed by damp ringlets, her hooting laughter.

I thought: This is the Japanese at their best—a sunny winter Sunday, their day off, and they choose to spend it at the $5 spa having long soaks, growing red-faced, scrubbing themselves, stewing, and all the while talking without urgency. It was like the religious ritual Philip Larkin describes in "Water":

If I were called in

To construct a religion

I should make use of water.

Going to church

Would entail a fording

To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ

Images of sousing,

A furious devout drench,...

And chasing around (Larkin would have approved), the happiest and most human aspect of it, the little girl—naked, pinkish—in and out of the pool, playing tag with her brother in the sunshine and snow and steam among the older men.

Half a day there, scalded by water, penetrated by minerals, exhausted me. I stretched out in the lounge area and rested and drank water, then went back to Wakkanai and the snow, passed Love Doll, and kept going. With a powerful feeling of drowsiness and ease, I slept soundly, buffeted by dreams of crawling through a Japanese obstacle course of tunnels and ladders. Even as I was suffering this ordeal, the words "This is a dream" were in my head.

In the morning, with my strength back, I wanted to try the hot-spring experience again. Most of all I wanted to recapture the physical and mental bliss I had felt the day before. I made a few inquiries, tramping around Wakkanai in a light snowstorm.

Two people said, "Go to Toyotomi."

Toyotomi was about forty-five minutes down the railway line, and the mineral hot springs at its community onsen, as well as being relaxing, were said to be beneficial to the skin. I took my bag in case Toyotomi proved to be a good place to stay overnight.