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By Root 791 0

a low bureau and tall pivoting mirror and a few little drawers, and another area with a low writing table and a heating blanket called a kotatsu – basically a table you can bundle yourself up under and stay warm in while you write. There were a few flat pillows on the floor, a painting, and a single flower in an unadorned vase on a shelf. That was it. Sliding back one side of the room, I found myself looking out at a small garden, an orange tree, the mountains and valleys of Atami, and the ocean beyond. Every room at the inn had been ingeniously angled in such a way as to provide each visitor with a spectacular view – and yet maintain the illusion that one was completely alone, the only guest. I looked warily at the flat pillows on the floor. I knew what that meant. I’d be spending two days sitting exclusively on a hard mat floor, my long legs folded up beneath me. I was getting pretty good at contorting my six-foot-four-inch frame into correct Japanese dining position, my legs either tightly crossed or tucked under, knees in front. But getting up afterward was becoming tougher and noisier; the crunching and popping sounds of my forty-four-year-old legs reacquainting themselves with sensation after hours of numbness was not melodious to hear. Japan threatened to cripple me.

A server opened one of the screens from the long foyer to my room and motioned for me to sit.

Crunch! Pop! Snap!

At the low lacquer table in the main space, she gave me a hot towel, followed by green tea and a candied fig. She left for a while, reappearing later with a neatly folded stack of clothing. To my discomfort, she stayed to show me how, once I’d bathed, I should dress. A long gray-patterned yukata with billowing arms, a belt – which took many attempts for me to master tying and knotting correctly – an outer jacket, from which my arms protruded ludicrously, and little two-toed white socks, which on my size-twelve feet looked like particularly unflattering Mary Janes.

Left alone to bathe, I pondered my environment. I stared out the window, all thoughts of the outside world quickly banished. There was nothing in my room, just that single flower, the paper walls, the wide expanse of floor. In no time, I felt my metabolism shift, my whole system undergoing some kind of temporary metamorphosis from neurotic, hyperactive, short attention-spanned New Yorker to a character in a Kurosawa samurai flick. The surroundings were identical. I felt I could sit there forever in my yukata motionless, doing nothing more involved than contemplating an orange.

There were two parts to the bathroom. The toilet, a typically Japanese device overloaded with gadgets, was in one room. It looked like a regular toilet that had been tricked out by a bunch of speed-freak aerospace engineers. From the array of multicolored buttons, plastic tubes, non-English instructions and diagrams, I gathered that the thing could clean and sterilize itself after each use; spinning and washing the seat, it could direct various widths and pressures of warm-water jet at your rectum – a feature that might cause my old sous-chef, Steven, never to leave; it could wash, sanitize, powder, and emoliate every recess of your nether regions; and it could probably play a medley of popular show tunes while doing it. I was afraid to flush the damn thing.

The other part of the room was more in keeping with my idea of superior plumbing. A deep oblong cedar tub sat against one wall, next to an open window, from which one could gaze out at the mountaintops without being seen, along with an adjacent area in which to wash oneself prior to soaking in the tub. There were a small wooden stool, a scrub brush, a wooden bucket, and a high-powered-spray shower attachment. The idea was to squat on the wooden stool, soap up, scrub oneself down with the hard-bristle brush, pausing to rinse now and again with buckets of hot or cold water, as one liked, then shower. The whole floor, tiled in black granite, tilted conveniently into recessed troughs and drains. After one’s outer layers of skin had been scrubbed off, one