Notes of Things Seen and Heard
This compact sequence of observations turns everyday details into clues about character, prejudice, and social display. Akutagawa moves briskly from the line of a neck and the grain of a voice to a cat's surprising diet, a fanatic's mannerisms, and an informal experiment in standards of beauty. The later notes grow darker: a drowned body mistaken for a watermelon, a hand imagined as a seal's flipper, and three unsettling emblems of women's lives. Each fragment stands alone, yet the sequence continually exposes the mind at work—classifying people, testing appearances, and discovering cruelty or comedy in a single gesture. The translation retains all twelve observations and their abrupt changes of tone.
Strangely enough, our character generally reveals itself in the line of the neck. A person whose line there is dull is not sensitive.
Our character also reveals itself in the voice. A person with a hard voice is invariably strong.
Bamboo shoots, laver, buckwheat noodles—when I learned that cats ate such things, I could do nothing but marvel.
Portrait of a fanatic: his skin has a sheen. And whenever he speaks with fervor, he invariably closes one eye, as though taking aim with a rifle.
I once spoke with a man who raised only his left eyebrow whenever he became absorbed in conversation. I wonder whether eyebrows like that are common.
I showed several photographs of women to people whom I considered roughly equal in education and taste, and asked each to choose the most beautiful. Yet among twenty-five people, only two selected the same woman. It would seem that even judgments of female beauty and ugliness agree no more than four percent of the time. And this, as I have said, was only among people of similar education and taste.
A fruit wholesaler's daughter told me: “I thought there was a watermelon floating in the river, but it was the head of a drowned corpse.”
Whenever I see the hand of a fat person, for some reason I think of a seal's flipper.
I remember three trophies from the lives of women.
One was a mother nursing her second child while turning her back on her eldest daughter.
One was a cluster of medals from various schools hanging on the breast of a waitress.
One was the baby that the wife of a former professional entertainer invariably brought out in her arms before visitors.