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pictures printed in beautiful colors. A man and woman in those pictures were in strange positions. I realized it was the same kind of book I had seen in the Ohara house when I was much younger. But because my knowledge had increased considerably since I had first been shown that book, I could now understand much more than I had at that time. It has been said Michelangelo used bold perspective in drawing the characters in his murals, but since the persons in these Japanese drawings were quite different in that they had been made to assume very unusual poses, it was quite excusable for a boy to have difficulty in distinguishing an arm from a leg. This time, however, I could easily make out arms and legs. And I realized this was the secret I had previously tried to penetrate.
    Fascinated, I looked repeatedly at a number of these pictures. But I must say this: At the time I didn't realize in the least that this kind of human behavior had any connection to human desire. Schopenhauer says: No person with an awakened consciousness wants to have a child; no man wants to attempt to propagate his own species. And so nature made propagation go hand in hand with pleasure and incarnated it into desire. This pleasure, this desire, is the trick, the bait, nature has devised to force human beings to breed. Lower forms of life have been given no such bait, in fact, have no objections to multiplying. Nor, Schopenhauer has said, have they any wakened consciousness. I was totally ignorant that the behavior of the persons in this type of drawing was equal to this kind of bait. The reason I enjoyed looking at those drawings again and again came merely from the pleasure I had found in discovering something I had not known before. It was nothing but Neugierde. Nothing but Wissbegierde. I was looking at these pictures with eyes completely different from those of that girl in the youthful hairdo, the girl who had been shown these pictures by Mrs. Ohara.
    While I kept glancing at them over and over again, some doubts occurred. One part of the body was drawn with extreme exaggeration. When I was much younger, it had been quite natural for me to think that this part of the body was a leg when it actually wasn't. Drawings of this type can be discovered in any country, but only in Japan do we find them with such monstrous proportions for this part of the body. This was an invention of the ukiyoe artists of our country. The ancient Greek artists, in creating the figure of a god, enlarged the brow and made the lower portions of the face smaller. Because the brow was thought to be the dwelling place of the soul, they enlarged it in order to emphasize it. The lower parts of the face—the mouth and the teeth in the upper and lower jaws used for masticating—were made small because these portions were thought to be baser parts of the body. If Greek artists had shaped these parts of the face larger, the human face would gradually have come to resemble that of a monkey. Then anthropologist Peter Camper's description and analysis of facial angle (in which the wider the angle made by the line from one's brow to one's upper jaw and the line drawn from the base of the nose to the ear cavity, the greater the intelligence) would have indicated smaller and smaller capacity. Furthermore, the Greeks made the breast comparatively larger than the stomach. That the stomach bears the same relationship as the jaws and teeth need not be particularly explained. The function of breathing is superior to that of eating and drinking. Moreover, the ancients believed that the breast or, to put it more precisely, the heart, did not have the function of circulating the blood but of stimulating the spirit. For the same reason that the Greeks enlarged the brow and breast, the Japanese ukiyoe artists enlarged some parts of the body when they created drawings of this sort. That had been somewhat difficult for me to understand.
    The Flesh Mattress is an indecent, licentious book written by a