There’s this one morning that I used to meditate on, when we were in the thick of the lockdowns. I wake up with the sunlight piercing a paper-thin blind. Still bleary with sleep, I pull on a crisp cotton robe over crisp cotton pyjamas, scooping slider-like slippers onto each foot. With not another soul in sight, I pad down a series of steps cut into hefty rocks, slivers of bamboo tickling me as I go, the sunrise just peeking above the horizon. I can hear the waves below. Reaching the bottom of the boulder-steps, I can see it: a sculpted, sunken pine tub, filled with water, its puff of thick steam forming a luminous halo in the amber first light.
Don’t you feel better already? And this was no Covid fever dream – it was a memory. The steps led from a chic little ryokan (a traditional inn) in Atami, on the east of Japan’s Izu peninsula. Taking the hour-and-a-half train journey from Tokyo, I’d visited it in 2016, relishing the opportunity to shrug off all plans, decisions and day-to-day stresses and submit to the way of the ryokan.
