I have been trying to find more joy recently. The lily pads at 上野公園 comprise joy—they choke 不忍池 and project wide fronds up and above the water: enormous, almost fleshy protrusions lofted from low, round, cartoonish bases, each of which are marked, just as in every picture of them I have ever seen or imagined, by a notch. The prototypical lily pad, through and through. I have actually seen frogs sitting on them.

The pond, which is actually sectioned into three ponds: 蓮池, ボート池 (lol), and 鵜の池, is viewable from any angle, circumnavigable. If I want I can have the sun set into it, or else have the sun go down behind me so that my shadow instead slips beneath the water. Today I chose for the sun to go in: an act of self-preservation. I am spread a little thin today.

The pond is thought to be a marshy remnant, I looked it up: leftovers from a once far more inland-reaching Tokyo Bay. Like a vestigial organ or a wound that won't close. By now though the lake is considered old news, inseparable from the surrounding park and temple complex. This lake has been around so long, in fact, that they built a Starbucks nearby on a little bump in the landscape, and a very popular zoo, and plenty of small trendy stalls and stands catering to the intemperate interests of the young and fashionable 東大 students. So how bad can it be, really, that the sea retreated and left behind this? People are having fun. Commerce is thriving. Maybe it is like a birthmark, or a childhood story once embarrassing but now treasured and told at parties in lieu of saying anything heavy and depressing and honest about oneself. Maybe it is smalltalk. Maybe when I look at the lake I am missing the point, being distracted or misled, even if with good intention, and if I could only tear my eyes away from the sheer joy of the lily pads I would come into a much more nutritive truth. It might feel like how a boy comes into manhood. If only I could hate the pond, it might be good for me.

I know the gate on campus that is closest to the park; this sounds simple but isn't so easy. It is hard to find, the gate, less decorated than the others, narrower, with an ordinary shingled roof, manned by one of two or three of a rotating crew of old men whose job—gatekeeper—sounds ancient and straightforward. The gate dumps one into an alley. In the alley there is a row of vending machines rarely restocked, and which thus often fail to provide the requested beverage or snack, eating the money given to them. The vender becomes the vendee in a delicious, dramatic reversal. Many times I have come across people banging on the machines, trying to knock loose what they think they deserve. I guess they must go to the park next, and look at the lilies, and feel bad about their little snackless lives.

For college students in Japan the time is said to be the spring of their life. After the 大学入試センター試験 (let alone the secondary exams), things chill out—by all means one should be able to chill out, I think. By and large at elite universities studying is kept to a minimum—read as a syndrome or disease if leaned into too fervently. While there is value in the affect of an academic, in being thin and rude, there is not so much in its practice: its meat. The smart Bauhaus library complexes and modular pod cafés and buildings lofted and cantilevered above other buildings in canopic florescences are never filled with the studying or the obsessed or even the stressed. The truly enamored and cerebrally freighted or encumbered are usually more fearful of sunlight, the din of footsteps, earnest faces in public places. You'd never find them in a Starbucks, for instance.

I learned that the lily pads are part of a family of rhizomatous herbs, that they are filled with latex and mucus, and that they tend to leak when lacerated. Don't we all? If our blood were more viscous we might be less afraid of losing it—we might play all sorts of games involving teasing its expulsion, exploring its lazy affect, letting it stand or pool. Would this kind of blood change the feeling in my limbs? Would it lead to more fluid movements, or better sex? Would it overstress my heart? Surely I would die.

While sitting by the pond I got a text from 小村. Its style was unusual, free from the roman characters and abbreviations I'd gotten used to. In fact by now I had a reasonably large corpus of his messages, many of them not or only minimally responded to. My silence didn't seem to damper his spirits, or induce in him what I considered a ubiquitous fear that one was only ever being barely tolerated, let alone outright loathed, and this apparent lack of reflex, as if he were a movie-star or a cadaver, was astounding to me, almost miraculous. His text, in its new foreign, serious tone, was a secondary message, I learned—a note typed by him but from his roommate, who wanted to let me know that the usual end-of-the month ward meeting was being shifted from the 30th to the 15th—this Thursday—and that if I wanted to come I should make plans. The phrasing had all the little accouterments of an invitation, but maybe only apparently. As 小村 was only incidentally the messenger I too was only incidentally the subject. Below the first message was a link to a new posting on the ward office's 'community outreach and public events' homepage, highlighted blue. Brewster's angle light bounded off my phone and cut the bare HTML site into thin strips of unicode. Sure enough, in a little red box, a notice saying that the meeting had been moved by the request of ward community members. Included was a note that this was merely a 'special session' and not an 'emergency session.' Coffee and tea and light snacks would be provided. The red notice box had a dashed red border, and this custom touch was oddly affecting.

To be honest I think about web design a lot. Japanese web design in particular is often rectilinear, efficient, javascript-light, sessile—words like ugly and static assigned to it only by those people who have never had to wait for an oversize image to load, line by line.

The humidity pushed 96% today, temp in the high 20s C, and this will happen again tomorrow, and for the whole week. The heat keeps the viscous latex blood inside me thin and clot-free, I decide. It saves me. I was sure it was going to rain today, and had expected to experience this rain among the lilies, but it hadn't, and I didn't, and so the air had remained mortally waterlogged, knitting sartorial cotton to my skin. I came at sunset only to avoid the delirium promised to anyone stupid enough to watch the lilies in direct sunlight—I am only sad, not stupid. Before that was the 弱冷車, which it was my mistake to get on, and afterwards I went to the Starbucks and got an iced hibiscus (sparkling) tea and let the sweat on my forehead freeze. Rubbing my forehead dusts the tabletop with salt.

小村's absence from the message unnerved me, actually—never before had he sent a lone https link to anything, let alone a local government announcement page. The more I thought about it, the depth of thought coinciding with the depth of the surface of my rapidly vanishing iced hibiscus (sparkling) tea from its PET lid, the more it became obvious that the messages had been the first actual demonstration of 小村's roommate's power, and that in some extremely concrete sense 小村 had not been present during the exchange at all, in the same way that a fiber optic cable itself is meaningless to a man who says dirty things on a phone sex line. It struck me also that the roommate had remembered and made good on their earlier, seemingly offhanded mention of the ward meeting, which by now, sucking the dregs of the iced hibiscus (sparkling) tea did not seem so offhanded at all, let alone that my desire for wanting to go to such a meeting (but not to participate) was part in parcel to a larger metonymic thing about wanting to see (but not wanting to seek) my boyfriend. I hadn't even broken to 小村 that it was my boyfriend missing, and not just a friend.

The Starbucks employees were not going to force us to leave right away, but they were thinking about it, I could tell, so I left before they could say anything at all. The night air felt warm and wet and amazing, like a kiss.

Like 小村 I found it easy to want to believe that the roommate was extremely good at telling people things. I don't believe that humans are unqualifiedly susceptible or gullible, but I do believe that we get weak-kneed at the possibility of actual beauty. 小村 wanted so badly, I could hear it in his voice, in how he had eaten his food in front of me, for the roommate to tap him on his head, listen to whatever sound came back, and give name and diagnosis to what, to 小村, was so obviously but so unnameably wrong with him. It was not deluded to think that someone else could see something about you that you yourself could not see: this is one of the first things we learn, and what unnerves, us, when we see pictures taken of us, or hear the horror of our own voice in digital. 小村 definitely seemed to have at one time experienced a great deal of joy, and so it was only natural that he might want to retrieve it, and that his experiments might go so far as to include trying to not exist, to be simply not there, and to experience, for at least a little while, absolutely nothing.

The rain finally started when I was on the train back home—at three points on my line the train comes up above ground, and each in succession revealed a darker sky, an angrier pattern of rivulets against the polycarbonate, and a more dolorous beat to accompany the electric scream of the rails. All around me people read on Kindles and auxiliary devices meant to look like Kindles. Only the very young read physical books, flipping their pages expertly with one hand, and in all the time I spent trying to come up with a reason for why only the children and teenagers carried actual books, I couldn't make up a single explanation that didn't make me want to vomit—do the kids grow up feeling incredibly and modernistically separated from concrete, sensuous things, do they distrust their attention spans to conquer the cacophony of a whole library held in the palm? Do they lack the skill of individual assertion to such an extreme extent that they rely on distinguishing themselves through their chosen novel?

By the time I get back to my apartment, shirt slicked with rain and reconstituted sweat, I think maybe it is because there are so many student discounts for books, or fairs or events at which they are encouraged to buy them, the children. Or maybe because parents refuse to by their children their own little Kindle variants and knock-offs, though in fact these parents do not even have the strength, I think, to extend this little thought experiment, this exercise in a purity of consumption, to themselves.

Whatever it is, it's depressing. It makes me want to fall asleep.