Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur striplings who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but faunish (that is, demonish); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as "shotas."
It will be marked that I substitute time terms for spatial ones. In fact, I would have the reader see "nine" and "fourteen" as the boundaries - the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks - of an enchanted island haunted by those shotas of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea.
Between those age limits, are all boy-children shotas?
Of course not. Otherwise, we who are in the know, we lone voyagers, we shotacons, would have long gone insane.
Within the same age limits the number of true shotas is trickingly inferior to that of provisionally plain, or just nice, or "cute," or even "sweet" and "attractive," ordinary, plumpish, formless, cold-skinned, essentially human little boys, with tummies and shorts, who may or may not turn into adults of great beauty.
A normal woman given a group photograph of school boys or Boy Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the shota among them.
You have to be an artist and a madwoman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs - the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate - the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; he stands unrecognized by them and unconscious himself of his fantastic power.