Unit 1: Vocabulary from Readings 2

The tale of Urashima Taro is familiar to every Japanese. No doubt the three little boys had heard their father tell it before—and more than once. But they listened with rapt attention.

Desolate, Taro decided to open the box given him by the princess.

Even Matsuzo found himself deeply touched. He wondered why the farmer had told his sons such a poignant bedtime story.

While we stood talking, a smell reached our noses, a wonderful smell of freshly cooked rice. Suddenly I felt ravenous. From the way Tokubei swallowed, I knew he was feeling just as hungry.

However, to compensate for our inadequacies, we will charge a lower fee than that of an inn with an established reputation.

The germs of influenza can only exist in an acid condition, he explained.

This was a light epidemic of flu and there was no danger if you avoided pneumonia.

I went up to him and found him in exactly the position I had left him, white-faced, but with the tops of his cheeks flushed by the fever, staring still as he had stared at the foot of the bed.

She was rearing back on her heels, her hands jammed into her back pockets, her face squinched up like the masterpiece she had in mind was taking shape on the wall by magic.

Then she stepped down like she was in a trance.

“These are the flags of liberation,” he said in a voice I’d never heard him use before.

It’s happened three years now, and this is the only time anyone’s been here with me to verify it. You wait and watch.

One of the monster eyes caught and held and flashed back our immense light, red, white, red, white, like a disk held high and sending a message in primeval code.

And the monster swam off away from the heat and the silence and didn’t come back. I suppose it’s been brooding on it for a year now, thinking it over from every which way.