The night I lost umbrella number one, I tried stingray for the first time – ordered for me by my enthusiastic dining companions: a group of women who all work full time, are married and have children. Also on the menu was horumon cuts of meat eaten to restore stamina and honour mottainai – avoiding wastefulness.
“Always, I am so tired,” said one, biting into some liver. “So this is helping!”
“Do you share the housework with your husband?” I asked.
“Mm, no. Only me. He is always working, and has business trips on the weekend.”
“Every weekend?”
“Yes. We just finished making a bedroom for my oldest son, but my husband sleeps in there instead. I didn’t think an 11-year-old would still want to share, but me, my 11-year-old and my 6-year-old sleep in the same bed every night. We cuddle.”
When we finished eating, my friend who had invited me welled up. “These are happy tears,” she insisted. “Tonight is special. I never get to go to izakaya anymore.”
The night I lost umbrella number two, I was at a jazz bar in Hakuba with a gaggle of my students. My phone vibrated with an email from the bus company, and I opened it, panic-stricken:
“Due to the upcoming [heavy snowfall], there is a possibility that the highway bus you have booked will be [suspended].”
Missing the bus back to Tokyo meant I’d be unable to make it south in time to do a travel-writing project I had scheduled in Ise-Shima – which was quite needed, as I lost my job a few weeks ago. There, for generations, women divers have been collecting seafood and pearl oysters, but the practice is dying out as younger generations move into Japan’s bigger cities.
I left the bar in a rush, dashing home to research an alternative exit plan – leaving my freshly bought yuzu sour on the table and my black umbrella huddled up in the outside stand.
I knew leaving these two umbrellas behind meant they would turn into kasa-obake: the mischievous yōkai umbrellas spring into when abandoned. A leg would grow where the umbrellas’ handles had been, an eye would pop out near the end tops, and snaking tongues would sprout from their canopies.
Though they aren’t exactly dangerous, one of kasa-obake favourite things to do is sneak up on humans and give them a big oily lick. Caution is advised.
It makes it easier – the loss, that is – knowing they will transform into something new. I suppose that’s the same with everything.
My students were overjoyed at the prospect of getting snowed in – and rightly so, because the old lodge we were shacked up would be even prettier in the dazzling white of winter, the experience even more novel. For some, it would be their first snowfall.
They were equally as excited about visiting the onsen in the town over the next day: a mineral-fed hot spring overlooking the staggering alps, where you bathe naked in gender-segregated pools with other people. But some were also nervous.
“I’ll come with you, if that makes it less stressful,” I offered, as it can be intimidating to work out the buying-a-ticket and using-a-locker and washing-yourself-beforehand process if you don’t know how.
“Actually, that makes it worse,” one quipped back.
She was kidding, but I get it. I was 14 the first time I had to get in communal bath with other women, on a school exchange with a Japanese teacher who would have been the same age I am now, if not younger.
“Hurry up girls!” she’d said exasperatedly, as my friends and I sat beside each other at the low-hanging showers and shaved our pubic hair with 100-yen razors, humiliated and nervous at the prospect of anyone seeing our naked teenage bodies.
I’ve come a long with my body since then, and my body hair. We women all have, actually – and the onsen visit went without a hiccup. It was beautiful, in fact.
As dawn broke that Sunday, I stepped outside the lodge as snow fell from the sky and dusted the pines and the old wooden houses. After I left the jazz bar, one of my friends had retrieved my umbrella for me, and I used it to shield my hair from the falling clumps of moisture.
When the train clattered up to the platform, I clambered aboard with a sigh of relief. The buses might not be running later on, but for now, the snow was still light enough for the railway to function.
I sat down and gazed out the window at a troupe of macaque monkeys, who were sitting in a field and combing through the snow for food. Then my phone vibrated again. It was a message from one of the women I’d shared stingray with the night I’d lost my first umbrella.
“Mayuko-san went back to the izakaya and has delivered me the umbrella you left. Please pick it up!”