Part 4
There are different varieties of this much-prized insect. The _abura-kirigirisu_, a day-singer, is a delicate creature, and must be carefully nourished in confinement. The _tachi-kirigirisu_, a night-singer, is more commonly found in the market. Captured _kirigirisu_ sold in Tōkyō are mostly from the neighborhood of Itabashi, Niiso, and Todogawa; and these, which fetch high prices, are considered the best. They are large vigorous insects, uttering very clear notes. From Kujiukuri in Kadzusa other and much cheaper _kirigirisu_ are brought to the capital; but these have a disagreeable odor, suffer from the attacks of a peculiar parasite, and are feeble musicians.
As stated elsewhere, the sounds made by the kirigirisu are said to resemble those of the Japanese words, “_Tsuzuré--sasé! sasé!_” (Torn clothes--patch up! patch up!); and a large proportion of the many poems written about the insect depend for interest upon ingenious but untranslatable allusions to those words. I offer renderings therefore of only two poems on the _kirigirisu_,--the first by an unknown poet in the _Kokinshū_; the second by Tadafusa:--
O Kirigirisu! when the clover changes color, Are the nights then sad for you as for me that cannot sleep?
O Kirigirisu! cry not, I pray, so loudly! Hearing, my sorrow grows, and the autumn-night is long!
_Kusa-hibari._
The _kusa-hibari_, or “Grass-Lark,”--also called _Asa-suzu_, or “Morning-Bell;” _Yabu-suzu_, or “the Little Bell of the Bamboo-grove;” _Aki-kazé_, or “Autumn-Wind;” and _Ko-suzu-mushi_, or “the Child of the Bell-Insect,”--is a day-singer. It is very small,--perhaps the smallest of the insect-choir, except the _Yamato-suzu_.
_Kin-hibari._
The _kin-hibari_, or “Golden Lark” used to be found in great numbers about the neighborhood of the well-known Shino-bazu-no-iké,--the great lotos-pond of Uyeno in Tōkyō;--but of late years it has become scarce there. The _kin-hibari_ now sold in the capital are brought from Todogawa and Shimura.
_Kuro-hibari._
The _kuro-hibari_, or “Black Lark,” is rather uncommon, and comparatively dear. It is caught in the country about Tōkyō, but is never bred.
_Kōrogi._
There are many varieties of this night-cricket,--called _kōrogi_ from its music:--“_kiri-kiri-kiri-kiri!--kōro-kōro-kōro-kōro!--ghi-ï-ï-ï-ï-ï-ï!_” One variety, the _ebi-kōrogi_, or “shrimp-kōrogi,” does not make any sound. But the _uma-kōrogi_, or “horse-kōrogi;” the _Oni-kōrogi_, or “Demon-kōrogi;” and the _Emma-kōrogi_, or “Cricket-of-Emma[14] [King of the Dead],” are all good musicians. The color is blackish-brown, or black;--the best singing-varieties have curious wavy markings on the wings.
An interesting fact regarding the _kōrogi_ is that mention of it is made in the very oldest collection of Japanese poems known, the _Manyōshu_, probably compiled about the middle of the eighth century. The following lines, by an unknown poet, which contain this mention, are therefore considerably more than eleven hundred years old:--
Niwa-kusa ni Murasamé furité Kōrogi no Naku oto kikeba Aki tsukinikeri.
[“Showers have sprinkled the garden-grass. Hearing the sound of the crying of the kōrogi, I know that the autumn has come.”]
_Kutsuwamushi._
There are several varieties of this extraordinary creature,--also called onomatopoetically _gatcha-gatcha_,--which is most provokingly described in dictionaries as “a kind of noisy cricket”! The variety commonly sold in Tōkyō has a green back, and a yellowish-white abdomen; but there are also brown and reddish varieties. The _kutsuwamushi_ is difficult to capture, but easy to breed. As the _tsuku-tsuku-bōshi_ is the most wonderful musician among the sun-loving cicadæ or _semi_, so the _kutsuwamushi_ is the most wonderful of night-crickets. It owes its name, which means “The Bridle-bit-Insect,” to its noise, which resembles the jingling and ringing of the old-fashioned Japanese bridle-bit (_kutsuwa_). But the sound is really much louder and much more complicated than ever was the jingling of a single _kutsuwa_; and the accuracy of the comparison is not easily discerned while the creature is storming beside you. Without the evidence of one’s own eyes, it were hard to believe that so small a life could make so prodigious a noise. Certainly the vibratory apparatus in this insect must be very complicated. The sound begins with a thin sharp whizzing, as of leaking steam, and slowly strengthens;--then to the whizzing is suddenly added a quick dry clatter, as of castanets;--and then, as the whole machinery rushes into operation, you hear, high above the whizzing and the clatter, a torrent of rapid ringing tones like the tapping of a gong. These, the last to begin, are also the first to cease; then the castanets stop; and finally the whizzing dies;--but the full orchestra may remain in operation for several hours at a time, without a pause. Heard from far away at night the sound is pleasant, and is really so much like the ringing of a bridle-bit, that when you first listen to it you cannot but feel how much real poetry belongs to the name of this insect,--celebrated from of old as “playing at ghostly escort in ways where no man can pass.”
The most ancient poem on the _kutsuwamushi_ is perhaps the following, by the Lady Idzumi-Shikibu:--
Waga seko wa Koma ni makasété Kinikeri to, Kiku ni kikasuru Kutsuwamushi kana!
--which might be thus freely rendered:
Listen!--his bridle rings;--that is surely my husband Homeward hurrying now--fast as the horse can bear him!... Ah! my ear was deceived!--only the Kutsuwamushi!
_Kantan._
This insect--also called _kantan-gisu_, and _kantan-no-kirigirisu_,--is a dark-brown night-cricket. Its note--“_zi-ï-ï-ï-in_” is peculiar: I can only compare it to the prolonged twang of a bow-string. But this comparison is not satisfactory, because there is a penetrant metallic quality in the twang, impossible to describe.
VI
Besides poems about the chanting of particular insects, there are countless Japanese poems, ancient and modern, upon the voices of night-insects in general,--chiefly in relation to the autumn season. Out of a multitude I have selected and translated a few of the more famous only, as typical of the sentiment or fancy of hundreds. Although some of my renderings are far from literal as to language, I believe that they express with tolerable faithfulness the thought and feeling of the originals:--
Not for my sake alone, I know, is the autumn’s coming;-- Yet, hearing the insects sing, at once my heart grows sad.
KOKINSHŪ.
Faint in the moonshine sounds the chorus of insect-voices: To-night the sadness of autumn speaks in their plaintive tone.
I never can find repose in the chilly nights of autumn, Because of the pain I hear in the insects’ plaintive song.
How must it be in the fields where the dews are falling thickly! In the insect-voices that reach me I hear the tingling of cold.
Never I dare to take my way through the grass in autumn: Should I tread upon insect-voices[15]--what would my feelings be!
The song is ever the same, but the tones of the insects differ, Maybe their sorrows vary, according to their hearts.
IDZUMI-SHIKIBU.
Changed is my childhood’s home--all but those insect-voices: I think they are trying to speak of happier days that were.
These trembling dews on the grass--are they tears for the death of autumn?-- Tears of the insect-singers that now so sadly cry?
It might be thought that several of the poems above given were intended to express either a real or an affected sympathy with imagined insect-pain. But this would be a wrong interpretation. In most compositions of this class, the artistic purpose is to suggest, by indirect means, various phases of the emotion of love,--especially that melancholy which lends its own passional tone to the aspects and the voices of nature. The baroque fancy that dew might be insect-tears, is by its very exaggeration intended to indicate the extravagance of grief, as well as to suggest that human tears have been freshly shed. The verses in which a woman declares that her heart has become too affectionate, since she cannot but feel for the bell-insect during a heavy shower, really bespeak the fond anxiety felt for some absent beloved, travelling in the time of the great rains. Again, in the lines about “treading on insect-voices,” the dainty scruple is uttered only as a hint of that intensification of feminine tenderness which love creates. And a still more remarkable example of this indirect double-suggestiveness is offered by the little poem prefacing this article,--
“O insect, insect!--think you that Karma can be exhausted by song?”
The Western reader would probably suppose that the insect-condition, or insect-state-of-being, is here referred to; but the real thought of the speaker, presumably a woman, is that her own sorrow is the result of faults committed in former lives, and is therefore impossible to alleviate.
It will have been observed that a majority of the verses cited refer to autumn and to the sensations of autumn. Certainly Japanese poets have not been insensible to the real melancholy inspired by autumn,--that vague strange annual revival of ancestral pain: dim inherited sorrow of millions of memories associated through millions of years with the death of summer;--but in nearly every utterance of this melancholy, the veritable allusion is to grief of parting. With its color-changes, its leaf-whirlings, and the ghostly plaint of its insect-voices, autumn Buddhistically symbolizes impermanency, the certainty of bereavement, the pain that clings to all desire, and the sadness of isolation.
* * * * *
But even if these poems on insects were primarily intended to shadow amorous emotion, do they not reflect also for us the subtlest influences of nature,--wild pure nature,--upon imagination and memory? Does not the place accorded to insect-melody, in the home-life as well as in the literature of Japan, prove an æsthetic sensibility developed in directions that yet remain for us almost unexplored? Does not the shrilling booth of the insect-seller at a night-festival proclaim even a popular and universal comprehension of things divined in the West only by our rarest poets:--the pleasure-pain of autumn’s beauty, the weird sweetness of the voices of the night, the magical quickening of remembrance by echoes of forest and field? Surely we have something to learn from the people in whose mind the simple chant of a cricket can awaken whole fairy-swarms of tender and delicate fancies. We may boast of being their masters in the mechanical,--their teachers of the artificial in all its varieties of ugliness;--but in the knowledge of the natural,--in the feeling of the joy and beauty of earth,--they exceed us like the Greeks of old. Yet perhaps it will be only when our blind aggressive industrialism has wasted and sterilized their paradise,--substituting everywhere for beauty the utilitarian, the conventional, the vulgar, the utterly hideous,--that we shall begin with remorseful amazement to comprehend the charm of that which we destroyed.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Nowaki_ is the name given to certain destructive storms usually occurring toward the end of autumn. All the chapters of the Genji Monogatari have remarkably poetical and effective titles. There is an English translation, by Mr. Kenchō Suyematsu, of the first seventeen chapters.
[2] The Kurando, or Kurōdo, was an official intrusted with the care of the imperial records.
[3] A _chō_ is about one-fifteenth of a mile.
[4] _Hagi_ is the name commonly given to the bush-clover. _Ominameshi_ is the common term for the _valeriana officinalis_.
[5] That is to say, there are now many people who go every night to the graveyards, to decorate and prepare the graves before the great Festival of the Dead.
[6] Most of these names survive in the appellations of well-known districts of the present Tōkyō.
[7] _Katabira_ is a name given to many kinds of light textures used for summer-robes. The material is usually hemp, but sometimes, as in the case referred to here, of fine silk. Some of these robes are transparent, and very beautiful.--Hakata, in Kyūshū, is still famous for the silk girdles made there. The fabric is very heavy and strong.
[8] _Amé_ is a nutritive gelatinous extract obtained from wheat and other substances. It is sold in many forms--as candy, as a syrupy liquid resembling molasses, as a sweet hot drink, as a solid jelly. Children are very fond of it. Its principal element is starch-sugar.
[9] Ōyama mountain in Sagami is a great resort of Pilgrims. There is a celebrated temple there, dedicated to Iwanaga-Himé (“Long-Rock Princess”), sister of the beautiful Goddess of Fuji. Sekison-San is a popular name both for the divinity and for the mountain itself.
[10] Prices of the year 1897.
[11] _Calyptotryphus Marmoratus. (?)_
[12] _Homeogryllus Japonicus._
[13] _Locusta Japonica. (?)_
[14] Sanscrit: _Yama_. Probably this name was given to the insect on account of its large staring eyes. Images of King Emma are always made with very big and awful eyes.
[15] _Mushi no koe fumu._
A Question in the Zen Texts
I
My friend opened a thin yellow volume of that marvellous text which proclaims at sight the patience of the Buddhist engraver. Movable Chinese types may be very useful; but the best of which they are capable is ugliness itself when compared with the beauty of the old block-printing.
“I have a queer story for you,” he said.
“A Japanese story?”
“No,--Chinese.”
“What is the book?”
“According to Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese characters of the title, we call it _Mu-Mon-Kwan_, which means ‘The Gateless Barrier.’ It is one of the books especially studied by the Zen sect, or sect of Dhyâna. A peculiarity of some of the Dhyâna texts,--this being a good example,--is that they are not explanatory. They only suggest. Questions are put; but the student must think out the answers for himself. He must _think_ them out, but not write them. You know that Dhyâna represents human effort to reach, through meditation, zones of thought beyond the range of verbal expression; and any thought once narrowed into utterance loses all Dhyâna quality.... Well, this story is supposed to be true; but it is used only for a Dhyâna question. There are three different Chinese versions of it; and I can give you the substance of the three.”
Which he did as follows:--
II
--_The story of the girl Ts’ing, which is told in the Lui-shwo-li-hwan-ki, cited by the Ching-tang-luh, and commented upon in the Wu-mu-kwan (called by the Japanese Mu-Mon-Kwan), which is a book of the Zen sect:_--
* * * * *
There lived in Han-yang a man called Chang-Kien, whose child-daughter, Ts’ing, was of peerless beauty. He had also a nephew called Wang-Chau,--a very handsome boy. The children played together, and were fond of each other. Once Kien jestingly said to his nephew:--“Some day I will marry you to my little daughter.” Both children remembered these words; and they believed themselves thus betrothed.
When Ts’ing grew up, a man of rank asked for her in marriage; and her father decided to comply with the demand. Ts’ing was greatly troubled by this decision. As for Chau, he was so much angered and grieved that he resolved to leave home, and go to another province. The next day he got a boat ready for his journey, and after sunset, without bidding farewell to any one, he proceeded up the river. But in the middle of the night he was startled by a voice calling to him, “Wait!--it is I!”--and he saw a girl running along the bank towards the boat. It was Ts’ing. Chau was unspeakably delighted. She sprang into the boat; and the lovers found their way safely to the province of Chuh.
In the province of Chuh they lived happily for six years; and they had two children. But Ts’ing could not forget her parents, and often longed to see them again. At last she said to her husband:--“Because in former time I could not bear to break the promise made to you, I ran away with you and forsook my parents,--although knowing that I owed them all possible duty and affection. Would it not now be well to try to obtain their forgiveness?” “Do not grieve yourself about that,” said Chau;--“we shall go to see them.” He ordered a boat to be prepared; and a few days later he returned with his wife to Han-yang.
According to custom in such cases, the husband first went to the house of Kien, leaving Ts’ing alone in the boat. Kien, welcomed his nephew with every sign of joy, and said:--
“How much I have been longing to see you! I was often afraid that something had happened to you.”
Chau answered respectfully:--
“I am distressed by the undeserved kindness of your words. It is to beg your forgiveness that I have come.”
But Kien did not seem to understand. He asked:--
“To what matter do you refer?”
“I feared,” said Chau, “that you were angry with me for having run away with Ts’ing. I took her with me to the province of Chuh.”
“What Ts’ing was that?” asked Kien.
“Your daughter Ts’ing,” answered Chau, beginning to suspect his father-in-law of some malevolent design.
“What are you talking about?” cried Kien, with every appearance of astonishment. “My daughter Ts’ing has been sick in bed all these years,--ever since the time when you went away.”
“Your daughter Ts’ing,” returned Chau, becoming angry, “has not been sick. She has been my wife for six years; and we have two children; and we have both returned to this place only to seek your pardon. Therefore please do not mock us!”
For a moment the two looked at each other in silence. Then Kien arose, and motioning to his nephew to follow, led the way to an inner room where a sick girl was lying. And Chau, to his utter amazement, saw the face of Ts’ing,--beautiful, but strangely thin and pale.
“She cannot speak,” explained the old man; “but she can understand.” And Kien said to her, laughingly:--“Chau tells me that you ran away with him, and that you gave him two children.”
The sick girl looked at Chau, and smiled; but remained silent.
“Now come with me to the river,” said the bewildered visitor to his father-in-law. “For I can assure you,--in spite of what I have seen in this house,--that your daughter Ts’ing is at this moment in my boat.”
They went to the river; and there, indeed, was the young wife, waiting. And seeing her father, she bowed down before him, and besought his pardon.
Kien said to her:--
“If you really be my daughter, I have nothing but love for you. Yet though you seem to be my daughter, there is something which I cannot understand.... Come with us to the house.”
So the three proceeded toward the house. As they neared it, they saw that the sick girl,--who had not before left her bed for years,--was coming to meet them, smiling as if much delighted. And the two Ts’ings approached each other. But then--nobody could ever tell how--they suddenly melted into each other, and became one body, one person, one Ts’ing,--even more beautiful than before, and showing no sign of sickness or of sorrow.
Kien said to Chau:--
“Ever since the day of your going, my daughter was dumb, and most of the time like a person who had taken too much wine. Now I know that her spirit was absent.”
Ts’ing herself said:--
“Really I never knew that I was at home. I saw Chau going away in silent anger; and the same night I dreamed that I ran after his boat.... But now I cannot tell which was really I,--the I that went away in the boat, or the I that stayed at home.”
III
“That is the whole of the story,” my friend observed. “Now there is a note about it in the _Mu-Mon-Kwan_ that may interest you. This note says:--‘The fifth patriarch of the Zen sect once asked a priest,--”_In the case of the separation of the spirit of the girl Ts’ing, which was the true Ts’ing?_”’ It was only because of this question that the story was cited in the book. But the question is not answered. The author only remarks:--‘If you can decide which was the real Ts’ing, then you will have learned that to go out of one envelope and into another is merely like putting up at an inn. But if you have not yet reached this degree of enlightenment, take heed that you do not wander aimlessly about the world. Otherwise, when Earth, Water, Fire, and Wind shall suddenly be dissipated, you will be like a crab with seven hands and eight legs, thrown into boiling water. And in that time do not say that you were never told about the _Thing_.’... Now the _Thing_--”
“I do not want to hear about the Thing,” I interrupted,--“nor about the crab with seven hands and eight legs. I want to hear about the clothes.”
“What clothes?”
“At the time of their meeting, the two Ts’ings would have been differently dressed,--very differently, perhaps; for one was a maid, and the other a wife. Did the clothes of the two also blend together? Suppose that one had a silk robe and the other a robe of cotton, would these have mixed into a texture of silk and cotton? Suppose that one was wearing a blue girdle, and the other a yellow girdle, would the result have been a green girdle?... Or did one Ts’ing simply slip out of her costume, and leave it on the ground, like the cast-off shell of a cicada?”
“None of the texts say anything about the clothes,” my friend replied: “so I cannot tell you. But the subject is quite irrelevant, from the Buddhist point of view. The doctrinal question is the question of what I suppose you would call the personality of Ts’ing.”
“And yet it is not answered,” I said.
“It is best answered,” my friend replied, “by not being answered.”
“How so?”
“Because there is no such thing as personality.”
The Literature of the Dead
Shindaréba koso ikitaré.
“Only because of having died, does one enter into life.” --_Buddhist proverb._
I