The Grasshopper and the Bell-Cricket

The story is told by a nameless first-person narrator who is observing events from a distance. The narrator views the children’s deeply serious play through the experienced eye of an adult, a position that reinforces his isolation, banishing him from the charmed circle of the children but allowing him to notice and understand what they do not. This position makes him uniquely suited to illustrate the tragic aspects of Coming of Age. When two of these children, selecting each other from among the crowd, move together across the threshold into adolescence, the narrator stands far enough on the other side of this threshold to understand what the moment means and what disappointments will likely follow it. The narrator gives the scene its meaning, but the children do not notice him at all, and from their point of view, he does not even exist. Given how much of the children’s energy is spent in forging identities for themselves out of art and romance, the narrator’s namelessness reads as a tragic consequence of his long immersion in the adult world.

The setting supports the nostalgic mood and further reflects the theme of Coming of Age. The narrator begins by “[w]alking along the tile-roofed wall of the university” (Paragraph 1). The university represents a place of higher learning, deeper awareness, and a rite of passage into adulthood. The narrator hears the call of an insect and is drawn to it, leading him to a playground surrounded by a white fence. White, a color of purity and simplicity, surrounds and protects the open playground rather than contains it. The white fence provides security to a part of the ground that is meant for play and youthful adventures. The narrator, who is contemplating the differences between adulthood and childhood, remarks, “Walking more slowly and listening to that voice, and furthermore reluctant to part with it, I turned right so as not to leave the playground behind” (Paragraph 1). There is a reluctance to let go of childhood and its accompanying protections of personal freedom.

The narrator moves beyond the fence to an embankment where orange trees and bushes grow. This is where he discovers the lanterns and the children playing outside. Their world is so self-contained and so apparently idyllic that it appears not to belong to reality at all: “The bobbing lanterns, the coming together of children on this lonely slope—surely it was a scene from a fairy tale” (Paragraph 2). The narrator shares the entire tale as an onlooker from the outside. The children never acknowledge his presence. The setting, the imagery, and the narrator’s physical distance as a mere bystander further illustrate the distance and contrast between the psyches of a child and an adult.

The narrator gives deep attention to the children’s lanterns, and his observations echo Yasunari Kawabata’s own interest in Modernism and the Virtue of Originality. In the short time since the children began searching for bugs together, a culture of lantern-making has arisen among them in which originality is the prime virtue. The children’s desire to stand out from the group spurs them on to new heights of creativity:

The pattern of light that one had in hand the night before was unsatisfying the morning after. Each day, with cardboard, paper, brush, scissors, pen knife, and flue, the children made new lanterns out of their hearts and minds. Look at my lantern! Be the most unusually beautiful! (Paragraph 3).

The narrator lists the materials the children use to make these lanterns, but the real materials are their “hearts and minds.” In lavishing attention and care on this craft, in seeking to “be the most unusually beautiful,” the children are creating identities for themselves, participating in an act of self-formation that requires the gaze of the others, even as the children seek to stand out as unique. 

The grasshopper and the bell cricket act as foils for each other and hold allegorical meaning in relation to The Elusiveness of Beauty. While these two insects are similar in appearance, the bell cricket is considered a rarity that holds spiritual significance, while the grasshopper is common and abundant. The bell cricket makes a unique sound, similar to the trilling of a bell, that the grasshopper is incapable of producing. In Japan, the song of the bell cricket is likened to the voice of Buddha. For centuries, people have meditated in the Suzumushi-dera (Bell Cricket Temple) in Kyoto among the songs of the bell crickets that are raised there. In the story, the bell cricket represents something special, unique, and spiritual. It draws the narrator and the children to it through its mystical song. It stands out as different, a separate individual from the grasshopper, much in the way that the children hang on to their individuality before succumbing to the pressure to conform as adults.

The bell cricket is true and authentic, like the authentic selves the children strive to create through art, and like the authentic love between Fujio and Kiyoko. As such, it can only be found through extraordinary good fortune or extraordinary patience, cleverness, and skill. The narrator makes this point at the end of the story, using the bell cricket as a metaphor for authentic love: “Even if you have the wit to search by yourself in a bush away from the other children, there are not many bell crickets in the world. Probably you will find a girl like a grasshopper whom you think is a bell cricket” (Paragraph 25). Kawabata understands romantic love in existentialist terms, as the validator of individual identity. One must become one’s authentic self in order to be loved, and then one must find the right person—the person capable of seeing that authentic self. This is what Fujio and Kiyoko do for each other. They find each other in this moment through luck, but also through their dedication to the practice of lantern-making and insect-collecting in which they have honed their craft, built their identities as artists, and learned to be patient and attentive in seeing the world around them. The narrator understands how rare this moment is, and ruefully, he predicts that it may never come again for either of them.