Japanese Literature

I have seen three photographs of the man.
One is a photo of the man as a child, perhaps around the age of ten, standing by a pond in a garden, wearing a rough striped hakama, with his head tilted to the left about 30 degrees and smiling ugly, surrounded by many women (I imagine they were his sisters, younger sisters, and cousins). Ugly? But the dull people (i.e., those who don’t care about beauty and ugliness) look at him as neither funny nor ugly.
“But the dull ones (i.e., those who don’t care about beauty and ugliness) look unamused and say, “What a cute little boy.”
However, those who have had some training in beauty and ugliness will immediately think.
“What a disgusting child!”
The child’s smile was not at all what I expected.
The more I looked at the child’s smile, the more I felt that there was something indescribably creepy about it. It’s not a smile at all. This child is not smiling at all. The proof of this is that the child is standing with both fists clenched tightly. Humans are not capable of smiling while clenching their fists tightly. It’s a monkey. It’s a monkey smile. It’s just an ugly wrinkle on his face. I wanted to call him a “wrinkled little boy,” but the expression on his face was bizarre, and it made me feel somewhat awkward and annoyed. I had never seen a child with such a strange expression in my life.
The face in the second photo was also surprisingly different. It was a student’s face. I’m not sure if it’s a high school photo or a college photo, but anyway, it’s a handsome student. However, strangely enough, it did not look like a living person. She was wearing a school uniform, a white handkerchief peeking out of her breast pocket, sitting on a wicker chair with her legs crossed, and she was still smiling. This time, the smile was not that of a wrinkled monkey but a very brilliant smile, somehow different from a human smile. It is not like a bird’s, but as light as a feather, just a blank sheet of paper, so it is smiling. In other words, it’s like he’s made up from scratch. It’s not enough to say he’s racy. It’s not enough to say that he’s frivolous. It’s not enough to say he’s grinning. Of course, the word “fashionable” is not enough. Moreover, if you look closely, you can sense that even this beautiful student has something weird and mysterious about her. I had never seen a young man with such a mysterious appearance before.
The other photo is the strangest of all. It’s as if he doesn’t know when he was old anymore. His head seems to be somewhat gray. In the corner of a filthy room (three walls are clearly visible in the photo), he is holding his hands over a small brazier, and this time he is not smiling. This time he was not smiling. There was no expression on his face. In other words, he was sitting and holding his hands over the brazier as if he was dying naturally. That was not the only strange thing about the photo. The forehead was ordinary, the wrinkles on the forehead were ordinary, the eyebrows were ordinary, the eyes were ordinary, the nose, the mouth, the chin. Oh, this face not only had no expression, but it also had no impression. It has no features. For example, when I look at this picture, I close my eyes. I have already forgotten this face. I can remember the walls of the room and the small brazier, but the impression of the face of the main character in the room has faded away, and I just can’t remember it at all. It is a face that cannot be depicted. It’s a face that doesn’t belong in a cartoon or anything. I opened my eyes. There was no joy in my heart as I remembered that this was the face I had seen. To put it another way, even if I open my eyes and look at the photo again, I can’t remember. So, I feel uncomfortable and annoyed and want to turn away.
Even the so-called “face of death” should have some expression or impression, but if you put a horse’s head on a human body, it would look like this. I had never seen such a strange man’s face before in my life.