protruding sternums are Our dominant gene

1. Buy your time ticket at the machine

I got a tattoo under my left breast in

June.

It reads 怖いもの知らず, kowai mono shirazu, not knowing fear. When I read it aloud, I read it with a clicking tongue, a small disapproving shake of my head, just enough to let the words tumble out. Maybe accompanying it with a sighing laugh, a small clinking reminder of love.

That’s how my grandmother used to say it to me. Back in

March.

When we still breathed the same unfiltered air occupied the same space before her hands grew bulbous swollen with fluid and I could no longer hear her pulse unless I towered over the tubes tied to her straining to hear her life over the noise of machinal beating.

Back when she could still call me to make the rice.

2. Show your ticket to the bathhouse owner

It was my sternum I’d notice first. Notice the hiccupping bulges woven into my ribs, a

snake’s spine suffocated beneath my sheet of skin and

take your finger to trace the edges of where it begins and

ends.

Under a fluorescent light I looked like the Operations game,

left out for prodding.

But An-es-the-sia: insensitivity to pain

I especially

don’t buzz as artificially induced by

when the administration of gases or the injection of drugs

you hover before

over my surgical

open operations

wounds.

3. Go into gendered bathing area

Lay out my bones along their perfectness, stain their vibrancy with my silence.

Haruna wears her black bangs, Nozomi her porcelain skin, Rola her big eyes, and Akiko

her fragility. All selling the ideals of womanhood.

But whose definition of it?

I came to Japan not to learn the lifestyle of anorexia, but to understand the ONNA. I

wanted sisterhood, love that would envelop me like the mist from the sento we stand in.

All soaking in this kettle of overboiling insecurities, to be later enjoyed and consumed

by our men.

But compassion cannot exist when money is to be made and skin is to be bleached.

Instead, we derive our femininity from our

patterns of consumerism,

only take up in arms when the white girl brands her underwear like our foremothers’

garment.

4. Find an empty woven basket

When I used to bathe with my mother, she’d always complain of her boniness. “It’s

your fault you know. If you weren’t such a greedy baby, I’d have my curves.”

Teasing, I’d ask if she even had curves to begin with, pointing out that I’d been cursed

with the same sunken chest. She’d laugh, acknowledging our common misfortune.

My mother developed a talent in the bath.

Retracting her body into her skin, she’d further press out her sternum. Two pockets on

either side of her collarbone would appear, symmetrical up her bellybutton. She’d cup

warm bathwater and pour it into each pool, the gag hosted in her hollowness.

“I bet you don’t know many moms who can do this.”

This I know is true.

There weren’t many mothers who were forced to eat either.

5. Undress

I stopped bathing with my mother after my first tattoo.

My body was now illegal under (circle one) our / their / Japan’s laws of the onsen, of the

sento, of the amusement parks and the pools.

We / They all leave the way we / they came, with nothing

but the skin on our /their backs.

Don’t disrupt this passage with permanence, a mark against our / their purity. Preserve

our/ their blessed porcelain skin and remain

temporary.

Let the world absorb us / them as he needs.

Belong to _________ (Fill in the blank.).

6. Open the sliding doors

So I hid

my body from her. I flinched

when she approached me for a hug. I declined

invitations to bathe with her and my grandmother, blaming

my shyness

on my whiteness.

I hid

under small hotel towels when we went to onsens, but only after I exhausted

the period excuse for that month. As my embellishments grew, the harder

it became to hide.

I considered revealing

myself to my mother a number of times but was always unable

to find the right words to be honest

about my nakedness. It was easier to forget

the custom of sharing nudity with our females than baring

my blemished

bones and ink. I selfishly

kept my skin to myself.

I was hyperaware of the line I had crossed in my culture. Japan, not unlike other Asian countries, disapproves of bodily embellishments. This disdain is often attributed to yakuza (gangster) culture, which historically required a stamping of the body to show permanent alliance. It’s gone beyond this though; many onsens and sentos ban tattooed people from entering.

To be banned for your skin.

7. Kakeyu // Wash your body

“They have yuzu rinds in the water today,” she whispers. She grins and beckons me in, milky silhouette disappearing in the spilling mist.

She promised me I’d be okay.

I hold her words to see in the dark.

(But then, I met her. Her, who loved Japanese bathing culture and the ease with which women could cleanse themselves surrounded by so many naked bodies. She wanted me to remember what hot steam felt like against the skin, reassuring me no one would care enough to look. I resisted her invitations, hotly reminding her she wasn’t raised with Japanese values, that she’d never understand the subtleness of Asian body complexes. But here I was, standing in front of those bamboo doors.)

8. Enter the bath

“You have such big”

“It’s just because I’m”

“At least it’s going somewhere useful mine is just”

“Look, my”

“jiggle when you shake it”

“they have dimples because I don’t”

“but you don’t want too much because you’ll look like a”

“he doesn’t care anyway he loves”

“so long as I can still do”

“I hope my daughter has more.”

Doryoku wa jishin ni tsunagari, jishin wa seikou ni tsunagaru.

~

Hanako Montgomery is a senior at Binghamton University, currently majoring in Japanese Studies and Asian and Asian American Studies. She has always found poetry and screenwriting to be therapeutic forms of expression. In her free time, she performs with her school’s latin dance team and finds delicious recipes to try on Pinterest. Her favorite food is currently seafood pancake.