不忍池, lotus flowers…

Natsume Sōseki should have written about the Shinobazu Pond (I’ll look up later - Sanshirō?)

For me it’s a place full of tears. I used to go there — it’s walking distance from the rear door of the Hongo campus of Tōdai — and cry my eyes out, because I couldn’t track down a primary source. Or because even when I’d found it in the stacks of the old Tōdai library (I used to spend my days in that 書庫, the stacks with all the hanpons (版本) — they closed it, and now you can’t wander around in there like a drunk Bulgarian), I still couldn’t read it the way close reading demands — or I demand of it. (Close reading always struck me as the drums in a free jazz trio: they might be holding something essential together, or they might not be there at all — you can’t always tell, and that uncertainty is the whole problem with the drums.) My homework/assignment would go to hell, and I’d carry it into sleep that never came.