Kurokawa: the Spring of My Life
Horse meat, singing frogs and six baths in a day
From Osaka, a Shinkansen to my old hometown of Hakata, a ramen pitstop, and a 3hr bus ride up into the volcanic highlands of central Kyūshū where our traditional inn - Wakaba - perches on the side of a river and above the great steaming swell of rising volcano water.
A beautiful room, a beautiful view, a beautiful bath fed straight from the heat of the earth. Our room had its own (with water at 70°), and the inn had a communal outdoor one, shaded by a bamboo grove and a Japanese rose tree. Again I was up before 5, with the sun and the singing frogs.
The food they give you in these places, eaten around a communal pit of glowing coals, is astonishing. The area is famous for river fish and horse meat, both eaten raw. Beef and eel too.
You can get a pass - a wooden talisman worn round the neck - that lets you into the town’s other baths. With our robes on, and the hard-going, clonking slippers and socks they give you, we made our hot water pilgrimage round this beautiful town.
Some of the baths were too picturesque that if I were to write about the aesthetic, it would seem contrived. In our first outdoor bath, set at the rapeseed fringe of a farmer’s field, cherry petals floated down from above the bath house’s Chinese roof tiles, settling in the steam of the gurgling water.
As with morning tea,
Chill wind clears the settled steam -
A spring day spring soak.
Lost petals floating
From beyond the horizon -
Hay fever again.
By the mossy rock
Through the steam, under blossoms -
Naveen’s chest hair swirl.
In another, like a scene from a Japanese version of the Tantalus myth, I was up to my collarbone in sulphuric, steaming water, with the fingers of lolling maple leaves, bright spring green, tickling my neck.
On his head a towel;
Nav’s neatly folded sun-guard:
A maple tree’s shade.
You could become very soft here.
Sayōnara for now.