This story in the original Japanese can be found here.
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The Account of My Senses
X
Mysteriously, our personalities can be read in the lines on the back of our neck. Those with dull-lines are not susceptible.
X
And our personalities can be read in our voices, too. Those with hard voices are undoubtedly strong.
X
Bamboo shoots, seaweed, soba…I feel nothing but admiration for a cat eating these sort of things.
X
A portrait of a religious fanatic: his skin is lustrous. And when he speaks passionately, he never fails to shut one of his eyes, as if he is hunting with a rifle.
X
I talked with a person who, each time he is totally absorbed in a story, raises only his left eyebrow. I wonder if there are many of these sort of eyebrows.
X
I showed many pictures of women to people who I thought were just about equal in education and hobbies and had them choose who they thought was the most beautiful. But there were just two people in twenty-five who said the same woman. To put it another way, even determining a woman’s beauty or ugliness cannot seem to be more than four in a hundred. Furthermore, as I said previously, this was just among people who appeared to be equal in education and hobbies.
X
What a fruit vendor’s daughter said: I thought of a watermelon floating in the river as the head of a drowned man.
X
When I see the hand of a fat person, for some reason a seal’s fin comes to mind.
X
I can recall three trophies of women’s lives.
One is a mother suckling her second child with her back to her first.
One is a tangle of various school medals hanging on the chest of a maid.
One is the baby always held in front of customers by the wife of a master artist.
(April 1927)