The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket

Compiled in a book of his short stories, The Palm in the Hand Stories, Yasunari Kawabata’s “The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket” explores many themes, including innocence, friendship, love and fate. The story is centered on the narrator, whom remains nameless, and their perception of the lanterns at night, though at a distance, only as an observer. “Wide-eyed, I loitered near them.” I find it interesting that there is a sort of bad connotation with some of the children uses store-bought lanterns; considering the other children have created beautiful, hand-crafted, original lanterns, I believe this is a commentary on when searching for acceptance and love; we look for those whom are not formed from the traditional mold of life, originality may be what sparks our initial attraction.

The symbolic transfer of the bell cricket from the boy to the girl could translate to the development of love and how, as rare as it is in the wild, one can captivate with a simple giving gesture. The narrator goes on to explain the rarity of such a find; “even if you have the wit to look by yourself in a bush away from the other children, there are not many bell crickets in the world.” It seems like the moral of the story, in the end, is that you don’t know what you’ve got until its gone or it may be too late to take action. I think Kawabata uses grasshoppers to symbolize the average, everyday romantic find, but in the case of the bell cricket, a truly important find. “And finally, to your clouded, wounded heart, even a true bell cricket will seem like a grasshopper.”