I had made this story a "Letter from a floating world" seven years ago but I wanted to have it here too: somewhere in the Japanese countryside, a samurai-hunter caught in the rain meets a girl and asks her if she has a raincoat to spare. The girl apologizes and gives him a few roses making a comment about them, the samurai leaves frustrated and confused and later realizes that the girl used a classical poem to tell him, using a pun, that she didn't have a raincoat to give to him. The samurai was Ota Dokan (太田 道灌, 1432-1486) and he later became a poet himself but he is most famous for building the first Edo castle in 1547, 150 years before Tokugawa Ieayasu make Edo his capital and the castle his residence. The two-statue complex of Ota and the girl offering him the roses on a fan, is also in the Chuo Koen (中央公園) park in West Shinjuku.
(For a bigger version of this picture both in color and black and white, check my "Japan Arekore" set on Flickr).
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