Had a spa the other day and this memory floated to the surface:

onsen song.

we exhaust his few words of English and my Japanese in the first minute.
his thin eighty year old naked body next to my potbellied western
version in the public bath at Taisho Pond. He tries to ask me questions
in nihon-go and I eventually shrug shoulders protruding from the
steaming waters. “Gomenasai. Nihon-go… muzakashii!”
(Sorry. Japanese – too hard!)
He replies. “No. English muzakashii!” We laugh and
lapse into a comfortable silence. Then he drags
his old body from the supporting arms of water
and squats on the stool, scrubbing himself all
over yet again. And begins to hum what I
guess is a Japanese folk song. Before long he is
singing full-throated and his thin speaking voice has
transformed into a baritone reverberating around
the stone walls of the onsen as it may have hundreds
of years ago. I try to memorise the notes to
reproduce it later, but the song now is just
a memory drifting upwards,
impossible to hold,
like steam from
bathwater.