The MIPPW — Most Important Piece of Paper in the World—was a hand-drawn map of a neighborhood in north-east quadrant of Gojo/Horikawa where I was staying during training at Urasenke tea school 34 years ago. My “address,” like many in Kyoto, relied on certain geographic features, rather than following a street name and numbers. I had no idea what the signs on the post next to the apartment said, as I cannot read much kanji. The MIPPW served me like the notes next to cookies for Alice in Wonderland.
After school, in late autumn twilight, I would travel southbound on the Horikawa bus from Teranouchi, getting off at Gojo, and ducking behind the main thoroughfare into the warren of look-alike wooden-fronted machiya, MIPPW now in hand. When I passed a huge statue of Kannon, standing guard 24/7 by the door of one of the many Buddhist temple supply shops now closed for the day, I knew I was close. Breathing a sigh of relief, I announced to the granite, “Honey, I’m home!”
I also relied on the MIPPW for my nightly saunter to the Hakusan sento, a simple place of refuge for my exhausted body and soul, worn out after hours of intense sitting seiza on tatami in kimono. The MIPPW was one of the few things I needed on my pilgrimage through the dimly-lit lanes to that humble, steamy paradise.
One night, after a bit too much warm sake, I went to Hakusan wearing geta and wrapped in a yukata under my rain coat, without the MIPPW. I got there on muscle memory and bravado. Taking my entry fee, the sento matron patronized me with an uncommon smile. As ridiculous as I looked, I felt at home and quietly joined salarywomen and schoolgirls hunched over spigots and basins, our dripping nakedness reminding me of freshly boiled shrimp. “Finally!” I muttered to myself, “I conquered the bath-house!”
Pink-cheeked but sober and tired, I still had to get home. I scrambled my sleepy memory for a few internalized guideposts—the restaurant window with a flower arrangement, a sign with modernist black cats against a yellow circle, the “antique” shop window with shadows of material remnants of Meiji cast by a flickering fluorescent. It all looked familiar… except the noren curtains were gone! I had no idea where I was. Retracing my steps from yet another dead end, I came upon a wooden shuttered facade upgraded with a metal roll security door. Painted on it was a mural of an otherworldly landscape in pink, blue and black, of palm trees, tall buildings and an ocean bay: it was the bluffs along the California Incline overlooking Pacific Coast Highway, located four blocks from my apartment in Santa Monica CA. In fact, I was “home.”
Reprinted from KYOTO JOURNAL #100 Fall 2021
