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I hear a giggle behind me. No one ever wants to hear someone giggle when they’re looking at your bare arse. Being as naked as the day you were born is humiliating enough as it is, at least where I come from. I look over my shoulder, still clutching my hired towel to my front, and see two overweight Japanese ladies staring at me. My first instinct is to tell them off for staring, but I’m in their domain. I’m their prey. The silly little gaijin who can’t speak enough Japanese to tell them to stop staring, who booked a night at a Monastery on remote Mount Koya-san, not realising the only bathing option was a communal onsen. I swallow thickly, feeling a surge of well-screw-you-I-can-do-this, and drop my towel. The thing is, I’ve had an eating disorder since I was nine. Not in the graphic way. My rib cage has never stretched my skin, and I’ve never had a doctor tell me to lose weight for my health – but I’ve always noticed how my thighs brush when I walk, how my arms expand when they rest against my sides and how I think about food and weight nearly every waking moment, letting it infect the corners of my brain until food is simultaneously something I resent, and am addicted to all at once. Japan has treated me well in the food department. Healthy for the most part and small portions in comparison to the overindulgent burgers I’m used to at home. It has almost made me love food again. Almost. It hasn’t taken away the shame when I eat. The Japanese ladies continue to giggle to themselves, wrapping themselves back up in the supplied robes. The worst of my eating disorder reminds me I’m skinnier than them, it also tacks on I’m not the skinniest in the room, however. The onsen is filled with steam, one half of the room filled with hot water and the other half lined with stools and handheld shower heads. It is customary to wash yourself before you get into the onsen, one of the Monks had told me upstairs. I grit my teeth as I sit on the stool, the rolls of my stomach resting against my thighs, my breasts resting against those rolls, my thighs flattening on the round base of the stool. I can feel all of it as the water trickles down my body, soap gathering in the crevices of my skin. The mirror across from me echoes my worst fears. “Don’t worry about those ladies,” a young Japanese woman next to me murmurs. I turn to look at her. She’s skinnier than me. “They’re not laughing at you being naked. We’re all naked. They’re laughing that you care so much,” she adds, before rising from her stool and sliding into the onsen. Had I been that obvious? God, can the worst of who I am be seen from the outside too? I finish up washing myself, thinking maybe I'll just tug on my robe and flee to my room. But the water looks so warm, and this mountain is freezing. I slide in feet first, submerging until only my collarbones sit above water, the depths of them making pools themselves. Seven other women are sat around me, including the young woman from before. They talk in hushed voices, uncaring of their naked bodies potentially being awkward. My thigh brushes the woman next to me but when I go to apologise her head is reclined with her eyes shut. The Monk’s mellow voices build into song in another room to signal the beginning of the evening prayer. The snow falls outside. The world still turns. And I giggle.