He turned to (火). The image was a single candle flame at midnight, the kanji’s dots and slash exactly matching the flicker. He felt warmth on his face.
Kenji Tanaka, a 45-year-old salaryman, had a secret shame. He had lived in Tokyo his entire life, yet his kanji literacy hovered somewhere around a sixth-grade level. In meetings, he would doodle in his notebook to avoid the embarrassment of misreading a client’s name. The complex character for “obligation” (義) looked like a tangled knot of thorns. “Wisdom” (智) was just a spider’s corpse. 1000 Kanji Understanding Through Pictures Pdf