“But Kiyohime turns into a snake, right? Snakes don’t have any hair at all,” I joked.
“That’s not what I’m saying.” My aunt seemed totally bored by my pedantry. “Did you know that in some performances of The Maid of Dōjō Temple, they have two dancing maids?” She shot me a great sassy smile, as if she were once again wearing the bright red lipstick of bygone days. Then, her expression suddenly serious, she took my slender hands in hers, pink nails and all.
“Let’s become monsters together,” she said, looking straight into my eyes.
“When my special trick is ready, I’ll make sure you’re the first to see it before I try it out for real.”
Those had been my aunt’s parting words as she left—through the door. But you’re a ghost was the thought that had run through my head.
I tried speaking it out loud now in the bathhouse. “But you’re a ghost!”
The damp, dense steam pervading the bathing area masked my softly spoken words.
Yet my aunt had been nothing like I imagined ghosts to be. Compared to me—a comatose coward who had spent two months cramming her head with all kinds of strange affirmations so as to pretend she was doing fine when really she was anything but—my aunt was spilling over with life.
Vigorously lathering my skin with my organic soap, I remembered my aunt’s words. She wanted me to “think long and hard” about what I could do with my hair. What on earth did that mean? It was just hair, for goodness’ sake.
But when I thought it through more deeply, I realized I didn’t think about it as “just hair,” after all. Hair was a problem that I carried around with me constantly. However much I shaved or plucked, it would always grow back again. It was like some everlasting exercise regime. And it wasn’t just me, either—all women were prisoners of their body hair. An image of all those women in the waiting room of the laser treatment clinic came floating back to me. It was the same here, in the public bathhouse. The ladies’ bath was heaving with women of all ages, many of them sliding razors over their arms or legs as they washed themselves. Bits of black hair swathed in foam went sailing down the drains.
I suppose I should explain at this point that my bathroom boiler mysteriously stopped working the night of my aunt’s visit, which was why I found myself in a public bathhouse. Perhaps it was the shock of her appearance that did it. I found the whole occurrence difficult to wrap my head around—a broken boiler, in the twenty-first century! In fact, the idea of having a twenty-first-century bath that relied on an old-fashioned balanced-flue boiler for its hot water was pretty insane as it was. That night, after my aunt had left, I’d stood there stark naked, flicking the lever over and over to try to get it to start, but the only response I got was a sad, muffled click that echoed across the bathroom walls. When I finally gave up and called the manufacturers, they informed me coolly that the earliest repair appointment they could give me would be in two days’ time. Two days’ time! The twenty-first century certainly wasn’t like this in the films I’d watched or the manga I’d read when I was younger. A twenty-first century where balanced-flue boilers and public baths still existed seemed like some kind of a con.
As it was, there I sat in the bathhouse that same evening, surrounded by women passing razors over their bodies, leaving their skin smooth and hair-free. It seemed to me unquestionable that it looked better. But when had it become better? Who had first been struck by the notion that skin would be more attractive if it was shaved? Who had been the first woman to shave? How had other people around them been convinced by their logic and begun shaving themselves? Why had I, born such a long time after them, come to think the same? Why, in the twenty-first century, did I have to fork out huge sums of money to go to the hair-removal clinic? Removing hair was the sort of thing you would think could be done painlessly, in an instant, what with all our amazing twenty-first-century technology.
Whenever the plastic washbasins and chairs scraped along the floor, they produced comic squeals that echoed through the big room. Around me I could see women with smooth, hairless skin; women who had not shaved in a while; and old women who didn’t seem to care about the little hair that was still left on their bodies. Why was hair such an inescapable concern for us? Suddenly fearing that all this scrutinizing of other people’s hair was going to turn me into some kind of pervert, I picked up the shower handle and began energetically massaging shampoo into my head of wet hair to divert my own attention.
On that hateful day that he dumped me, I had forgotten to shave. As soon as I’d realized, I’d begun worrying about whether he’d notice, debating whether or not I’d get away with it, cursing the fact that I’d worn short sleeves, obsessing over the few odd hairs scattered across my arms, trying to remember how long the hairs on my knuckles were and casually checking to see—and that was what I’d been doing when he mumbled something from across the table, something I couldn’t hear because he was speaking so quietly and because my mind had been wholly occupied with thoughts of my hair. I just said, “What?” and then the next thing I knew he was apologizing to me.
On the train back home later that day, I found my eyes rooted to one of the myriad advertisements for hair-removal clinics in front of me, although I’d never before even given them so much as a passing glance. The ad showed a picture of a beautiful woman with a broad smile on her face, and smooth legs extending from beneath her shorts. Long, pale, iridescent legs—now that I think about it, they were just like white snakes. The more I stared at that advert, the more it became obvious: the horrible thing that had just happened had happened because I wasn’t depilated. It had happened because my arms, my legs, and other parts of my body were not perfectly hairless—because I was an unkempt person who went about life as if there was nothing wrong with being hairy. That was why I had been dumped and cheated on, because the whole time, it turned out, he had been comparing the state of my hairy body with another woman’s, and had chosen between us accordingly. Those kinds of thoughts had flooded into my head with tremendous momentum, one after the other, and before I knew it, my desire to be free of the problem of hair seemed overpowering. I didn’t want to have to think about it anymore. In that moment, as all my strength drained out of me, I dreamed only of total hairlessness.
Rinsing the shampoo out of my hair now, I wondered why my aunt had come along and denied me that kind of freedom. I was sick of hair, utterly sick. Going around thinking about it constantly was a damn hassle. If I smartened myself up, made my skin hairless and smooth, then I was sure to meet a wonderful new man. Why did my aunt have to come and pour cold water all over my lovely, optimistic thoughts?
As I waited for the conditioner to sink in, I inspected my arms one at a time, both hair-free as a result of that day’s treatment. You see, Auntie? See how good they look? As I stroked each arm in turn, I felt the tears run down my cheeks. I hurriedly turned the shower on my face to conceal them.
The thing was, my aunt was absolutely right, and I knew it. Being hairless didn’t get you anywhere. It didn’t change a single thing. What an idiot I’d been! All those stupid, selfish things he’d come out with, like how his feelings for the other woman had “grown.” Had he been gauging his feelings with a measuring tape or something? And what did I go and say in response? “Well, I guess these things happen.” What a weed! At the very least I should have gotten angry. If I’d just thought about it, I’d have seen that everything he was saying was a load of shit, but instead I just bore it as best I could. And why? Why? Had I been brain-washed or what?