I needed to shit.
I’d been needing to since the park, but when I used the public bathroom there, I didn’t think I would have time (in case it was going to be a long one), so I pissed and held my arsehole tight.
To be fair, when I was in the park, it was definitely more of a poo that I was needing to do, but now it had escalated into a shit.
We all know the difference.
A shit is what is expelled when you’re hungover or have food poisoning. A shit will burn your insides on its way out. A shit is the voice of Tom Waits playing the devil.
A poo is your neat, daily bowel movement. The Olivia Rodrigo of your arsehole.
Unfortunately, at this moment, I was on train one of three from downtown Tokyo to Okutama. Though I’d only been in the city for two weeks for a journalism course, I needed to touch some grass, so to speak. The fare cost me 1100 yen: the equivalent of about 11 Australian bucks.
Before I had landed in Japan, I’d pre-made plans to travel to Kyoto for this particular weekend, but due to a budget blow-out (namely me accidentally buying the equivalent of AUD$700 of tequila shots for my new classmates at the karaoke bar from Lost in Translation, then stacking it down the stairs at Shinjuku station), I no longer had the spare cash for the shinkansen across the country.
So Okutama, with its mountains and forest and cheap transit, won.
I’d been hoping there would be a spare moment between trains one and two, but the public transport system in Japan is so efficient that, had I ducked into the station restroom, I would have missed my second once-an-hour train and then its connection to Okutama, meaning I wouldn’t get to my accommodation until well after sunset.
I sat squirming on train number two, unable to concentrate on the giant crappy book that I brought with me. All my focus was lasering in on my tight sphincter.
I must not shit myself on a Japanese train.
I’d never pooed in public. I didn’t want to somehow ever be compared to our former PM Scott Morrison, who shidded himself at Endagine Maccas, allegedly.
I was one stop away from my connecting train stop when suddenly, I knew.
Some of it was coming out.
I thought of that scene in Rat Race where the family is speeding across the desert and the daughter needs to poo, and she yells out to her dad, “I’m prairie dogging!”
I, too, was prairie dogging.
The train stopped. I ran off onto the platform and checked my phone’s maps app – I had a precious, stunning, incredible seven minutes until my connecting train to Okutama arrived.
Wildly looking around, I saw a sign I recognised: the universal symbol for the dunny. The toilet was just up the other end of the platform. I sprinted.
There, in the countryside of Tokyo, on a western-style toilet, I felt my guts turn inside out and leave my body. It felt like my arsehole was touching the hand of god. Clearly, I had drunk one-too-many highballs at the izakaya the night before.
Usually, I am the type of person who will inspect what my body has released. I sniff my tampons to know how my uterus lining is going; I mentally check the shade of my piss against a Pantone colour chart; I have kept up the habit since childhood of picking my nose and eating it; I take pleasure in scraping yellow gunk from just inside my ears; I pick flakes of dandruff off my scalp and scratch them out from under my fingernails; I sniff my bedsheets after every time I squirt (just to triple check it’s not piss – it never is piss).
But this time, I thought I’d save myself that peek into the void lest it peek back. That glorious detoxing feeling was enough.
I pulled my undies off and wrapped them up in reams of toilet paper. Unfortunately, a bit of god’s hand had smeared itself on the fabric, and I couldn’t bring myself to continue wearing them, nor throw them away.
I then placed this precious cargo in my spare plastic bag that I carry with me in my backpack, because an Instagram influencer assured me that they are essential for overseas travel.
I assume she uses them to sit on, and put wet bathers in, not hide skid-marked Anko-branded undies, but whatever.
Flushing my hideous inner portrait down the greater-Tokyo sewerage system, I then went to wash my hands.
But there was a big sign in Japanese laminated and taped onto the taps. Beneath the message was also a symbol of water, covered with a red X. Above the sink was an empty soap dispenser.
I couldn’t even cover my hands in soap and then rinse them out with water from a vending machine water bottle.
Panicking, I picked up my bag and walked out of the cubicle, hoping for an errant tap sticking out of the side. But I saw something better: the Men’s.
Inside, I tried the faucet and, like nectar from the gods, water flowed out. In front of my face was a mirror, on the bench was a nearly-full dispenser of soap.
I washed my hands more thoroughly than I ever did during the lockdowns, then hoofed it to my platform.
The air smelled sweeter; this train station was in the mountains. I could hear birds.
I made it to the platform just in time for the train to arrive. I took my seat, bowels empty and heart happy. I was heading to the mountains and finally, no longer needed to shit.