The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket

“The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket,” is an early story from Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata, published in 1924. The story considers the themes of Modernism and the Virtue of Originality, The Elusiveness of Beauty, and Coming of Age. Kawabata won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, becoming the first person from Japan to do so. His short stories have a poetic brevity, yet his diction, symbolic choices, and rich themes illuminate a depth belied by their apparently simple surfaces. “The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket” is an allegory told from the point of view of an unnamed first-person narrator describing the activities of a group of children who are searching for grasshoppers among the bushes of an embankment. He watches them as a detached adult, wistfully indulging in their childhood delight while feeling regret at the disappointments and compromises of adult life and lamenting his own exile from their idyllic world.

This guide refers to the version in Robert Shapard and James Thomas’s 1989 Sudden Fiction International: 60 Short-Short Stories collection as translated by Lane Dunlop.

The story begins with the first-person narrator describing his walk along the grounds of a school. He uses contrasting imagery of light and darkness as well as sound in describing the scene: “Behind the white board fence of the school playground, from a dusky clump of bushes under the black cherry trees an insect’s voice could be heard” (Paragraph 1). The narrator walks in the direction of the insect’s voice, remaining within the playground rather than continuing his walk along the planned route. As he turns the corner, he is surprised to see an embankment covered in brightly colored lanterns, and he jogs with excitement toward them.

He stops himself when he realizes the lanterns belong to a group of children who are searching for insects in the bushes. Delighted by the handmade, brightly colored lanterns, he notes that they were designed “with love and care” (Paragraph 2). The beautiful scene touches him: “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 relates his theory of how this moment came to be: One of the neighborhood children heard the insect’s song and bought a red lantern to use at night to try to find it. Another child saw this and could not buy a lantern, so he made his own and joined the first child the following night. More and more children joined the search, each crafting their own lanterns. The narrator describes the lantern designs of these “wise child-artists” with admiration and great detail. The nascent culture of the insect-catchers prizes art and craftsmanship in the making of paper lanterns, so the child with the red lantern throws it away as “a tasteless object that could be bought at a store” (Paragraph 3). Even the child who first made his own lantern throws it away in order to craft a more complicated and beautiful one. The children were on a mission to “be the most unusually beautiful!” (Paragraph 3). He notes that the names of the children were cut out in squared letters, beaming from the lantern. He describes how the candlelight glowed with color from the lanterns and that they “brought out the shadows of the bushes like dark light” (Paragraph 4).

One boy finds a grasshopper and offers it to the group, yelling, “Does anyone want a grasshopper?” (Paragraph 5). Several children run over and tell him that they want it, but he stands in front of the bush, guarding it, and waves his lantern and continues inquiring if anyone wants a grasshopper. More children run over, expressing their wish to have it, but the boy offers it up yet again, for a third time, despite his ready audience of grasshopper-takers. Finally, another child, a girl, says quietly that she wants it, and the boy responds immediately to her, adeptly transferring the insect into her hand.

The girl looks at it and announces that it is not a grasshopper but a bell cricket. The children are excited about this discovery and repeat the news in a chorus. She places the cricket into her insect cage. The boy holds the cage up to his eyes, and by the light of the multi-colored lanterns, the narrator notices that the boy glances at the girl’s face.

It dawns on the narrator that the boy caught the grasshopper and called out if anyone wanted it specifically because he had hoped to give it to the girl. The narrator’s breath is taken away when he alone notices that the boy’s name, Fujio, is emanating from the light of his lantern in a greenish color directly onto the breast of the girl’s white cotton kimono. The girl’s lantern emanates red, and her name, Kiyoko, beams onto Fujio’s waist, also unseen by anyone but the narrator.

The narrator reflects that even if Fujio and Kiyoko always remember that he gave her the cricket and that she accepted it, they will never even dream that their names were written across each other’s bodies because they did not notice or understand what happened. The narrator hopes that as Fujio grows into a young man, he will laugh “with pleasure” when a girl expects a grasshopper but is delighted with a cricket instead. He hopes he will also laugh “with affection” if the opposite occurs.

The narrator addresses Fujio to himself, telling him that he will probably grow up to find a girl who is like a grasshopper but whom he will believe is a bell cricket. The narrator considers the eventual consequences of this miscalculation: “And finally, to your clouded, wounded heart, even a true bell cricket will seem like a grasshopper” (Paragraph 20). He laments that should that day come, it will sadden the narrator to think that Fujio never had the knowledge that his name “was written in green by [his] beautiful lantern on a girl’s breast” (Paragraph 20).