Frogs
“With hands resting upon the floor, reverentially you repeat your poem, O frog!”
Ancient Poem.
I
Few of the simpler sense-impressions of travel remain more intimately and vividly associated with the memory of a strange land than sounds,—sounds of the open country. Only the traveller knows how Nature’s voices—voices of forest and river and plain—vary according to zone; and it is nearly always some local peculiarity of their tone or character that appeals to feeling and penetrates into memory,—giving us the sensation of the foreign and the far-away. In Japan this sensation is especially aroused by the music of insects,—hemiptera uttering a sound-language wonderfully different from that of their Western congeners. To a lesser degree the exotic accent is noticeable also in the chanting of Japanese frogs,—though the sound impresses itself upon remembrance rather by reason of its ubiquity. Rice being cultivated all over the country,—not only upon mountain-slopes and hill-tops, but even within the limits of the cities,—there are flushed levels everywhere, and everywhere frogs. No one who has travelled in Japan will forget the clamor of the ricefields.
Hushed only during the later autumn and brief winter, with the first wakening of spring waken all the voices of the marsh-lands,—the infinite bubbling chorus that might be taken for the speech of the quickening soil itself. And the universal mystery of life seems to thrill with a peculiar melancholy in that vast utterance—heard through forgotten thousands of years by forgotten generations of toilers, but doubtless older by myriad ages than the race of man.
Now this song of solitude has been for centuries a favorite theme with Japanese poets; but the Western reader may be surprised to learn that it has appealed to them rather as a pleasant sound than as a nature-manifestation.
Innumerable poems have been written about the singing of frogs; but a large proportion of them would prove unintelligible if understood as referring to common frogs. When the general chorus of the ricefield finds praise in Japanese verse, the poet expresses his pleasure only in the great volume of sound produced by the blending of millions of little croakings,—a blending which really has a pleasant effect, well compared to the lulling sound of the falling of rain. But when the poet pronounces an individual frog-call melodious, he is not speaking of the common frog of the ricefields. Although most kinds of Japanese frogs are croakers, there is one remarkable exception—(not to mention tree-frogs),—the kajika, or true singing-frog of Japan. To say that it croaks would be an injustice to its note, which is sweet as the chirrup of a song-bird. It used to be called kawazu; but as this ancient appellation latterly became confounded in common parlance with kaeru, the general name for ordinary frogs, it is now called only kajika. The kajika is kept as a domestic pet, and is sold in Tōkyō by several insect-merchants. It is housed in a peculiar cage, the lower part of which is a basin containing sand and pebbles, fresh water and small plants; the upper part being a framework of fine wire-gauze. Sometimes the basin is fitted up as a ko-niwa, or model landscape-garden. In these times the kajika is considered as one of the singers of spring and summer; but formerly it was classed with the melodists of autumn; and people used to make autumn-trips to the country for the mere pleasure of hearing it sing. And just as various places used to be famous for the music of particular varieties of night-crickets, so there were places celebrated only as haunts of the kajika. The following were especially noted:—
Tamagawa and Ōsawa-no-Iké,—a river and a lake in the province of Yamashiro.
Miwagawa, Asukagawa, Sawogawa, Furu-no-Yamada, and Yoshinogawa,—all in the province of Yamato.
Koya-no-Iké,—in Settsu.
Ukinu-no-Iké,—in Iwami.
Ikawa-no-Numa,—in Kōzuké.
Now it is the melodious cry of the kajika, or kawazu, which is so often praised in far-Eastern verse; and, like the music of insects, it is mentioned in the oldest extant collections of Japanese poems. In the preface to the famous anthology called Kokinshū, compiled by Imperial Decree during the fifth year of the period of Engi (A. D. 905), the poet Ki-no-Tsurayuki, chief editor of the work, makes these interesting observations:—
—“The poetry of Japan has its roots in the human heart, and thence has grown into a multi-form utterance. Man in this world, having a thousand millions of things to undertake and to complete, has been moved to express his thoughts and his feelings concerning all that he sees and hears. When we hear the uguisu[73] singing among flowers, and the voice of the kawazu which inhabits the waters, what mortal [lit.: ‘who among the living that lives’] does not compose poems?”
The kawazu thus referred to by Tsurayuki is of course the same creature as the modern kajika: no common frog could have been mentioned as a songster in the same breath with that wonderful bird, the uguisu. And no common frog could have inspired any classical poet with so pretty a fancy as this:—
Té wo tsuité,
Uta moshi-aguru,
Kawazu kana!
“With hands resting on the ground, reverentially you repeat your poem, O frog!” The charm of this little verse can best be understood by those familiar with the far-Eastern etiquette of posture while addressing a superior,—kneeling, with the body respectfully inclined, and hands resting upon the floor, with the fingers pointing outwards.[74]
It is scarcely possible to determine the antiquity of the custom of writing poems about frogs; but in the Manyōshū, dating back to the middle of the eighth century, there is a poem which suggests that even at that time the river Asuka had long been famous for the singing of its frogs:—
Ima mo ka mo
Asuka no kawa no
Yū sarazu
Kawazu naku sé no
Kiyoku aruran.
“Still clear in our day remains the stream of Asuka, where the kawazu nightly sing.” We find also in the same anthology the following curious reference to the singing of frogs:—
Omoboyezu
Kimaseru kimi wo,
Sasagawa no
Kawazu kikasezu
Kayeshi tsuru kamo!
“Unexpectedly I received the august visit of my lord.... Alas, that he should have returned without hearing the frogs of the river Sawa!” And in the Rokujōshū, another ancient compilation, are preserved these pleasing verses on the same theme:—
Tamagawa no
Hito wo mo yogizu
Naku kawazu,
Kono yū kikéba
Oshiku ya wa aranu?
“Hearing to-night the frogs of the Jewel River [or Tamagawa], that sing without fear of man, how can I help loving the passing moment?”
II
Thus it appears that for more than eleven hundred years the Japanese have been making poems about frogs; and it is at least possible that verses on this subject, which have been preserved in the Manyōshū, were composed even earlier than the eighth century. From the oldest classical period to the present day, the theme has never ceased to be a favorite one with poets of all ranks. A fact noteworthy in this relation is that the first poem written in the measure called hokku, by the famous Bashō, was about frogs. The triumph of this extremely brief form of verse—(three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively)—is to create one complete sensation-picture; and Bashō’s original accomplishes the feat,—difficult, if not impossible, to repeat in English:—
Furu iké ya,
Kawazu tobikomu,
Midzu no oto.
(“Old pond—frogs jumping in—sound of water.”) An immense number of poems about frogs were subsequently written in this measure. Even at the present time professional men of letters amuse themselves by making short poems on frogs. Distinguished among these is a young poet known to the Japanese literary world by the pseudonym of “Roséki,” who lives in Ōsaka and keeps in the pond of his garden hundreds of singing frogs. At fixed intervals he invites all his poet-friends to a feast, with the proviso that each must compose, during the entertainment, one poem about the inhabitants of the pond. A collection of the verses thus obtained was privately printed in the spring of 1897, with funny pictures of frogs decorating the covers and illustrating the text.
But unfortunately it is not possible through English translation to give any fair idea of the range and character of the literature of frogs. The reason is that the greater number of compositions about frogs depend chiefly for their literary value upon the untranslatable,—upon local allusions, for example, incomprehensible outside of Japan; upon puns; and upon the use of words with double or even triple meanings. Scarcely two or three in every one hundred poems can bear translation. So I can attempt little more than a few general observations.
That love-poems should form a considerable proportion of this curious literature will not seem strange to the reader when he is reminded that the lovers’ trysting-hour is also the hour when the frog-chorus is in full cry, and that, in Japan at least, the memory of the sound would be associated with the memory of a secret meeting in almost any solitary place. The frog referred to in such poems is not usually the kajika. But frogs are introduced into love-poetry in countless clever ways. I can give two examples of modern popular compositions of this kind. The first contains an allusion to the famous proverb,—I no naka no kawazu daikai wo shirazu: “The frog in the well knows not the great sea.” A person quite innocent of the ways of the world is compared to a frog in a well; and we may suppose the speaker of the following lines to be some sweet-hearted country-girl, answering an ungenerous remark with very pretty tact:—
Laugh me to scorn if you please;—call me your “frog-in-the-well”:
Flowers fall into my well; and its water mirrors the moon!
The second poem is supposed to be the utterance of a woman having good reason to be jealous:—
Dull as a stagnant pond you deemed the mind of your mistress;
But the stagnant pond can speak: you shall hear the cry of the frog!
Outside of love-poems there are hundreds of verses about the common frogs of ponds or ricefields. Some refer chiefly to the volume of the sound that the frogs make:—
Hearing the frogs of the ricefields, methinks that the water sings.
As we flush the ricefields of spring, the frog-song flows with the water.
From ricefield to ricefield they call: unceasing the challenge and answer.
Ever as deepens the night, louder the chorus of pond-frogs.
So many the voices of frogs that I cannot but wonder if the pond be not wider at night than by day!
Even the rowing boats can scarce proceed, so thick the clamor of the frogs of Horié!
The exaggeration of the last verse is of course intentional, and in the original not uneffective. In some parts of the world—in the marshes of Florida and of southern Louisiana, for example,—the clamor of the frogs at certain seasons resembles the roaring of a furious sea; and whoever has heard it can appreciate the fancy of sound as obstacle.
Other poems compare or associate the sound made by frogs with the sound of rain:—
The song of the earliest frogs,—fainter than falling of rain.
What I took for the falling of rain is only the singing of frogs.
Now I shall dream, lulled by the patter of rain and the song of the frogs.
Other poems, again, are intended only as tiny pictures,—thumb-nail sketches,—such as this hokku,—
Path between ricefields; frogs jumping away to right and left;—
—or this, which is a thousand years old:—
Where the flowers of the yamabuki are imaged in the still marsh-water, the voice of the kawazu is heard;—
—or the following pretty fancy:—
Now sings the frog, and the voice of the frog is perfumed;—for into the shining stream the cherry-petals fall.
The last two pieces refer, of course, to the true singing frog.
Many short poems are addressed directly to the frog itself,—whether kaeru or kajika. There are poems of melancholy, of affection, of humor, of religion, and even of philosophy among these. Sometimes the frog is likened to a spirit resting on a lotos-leaf; sometimes, to a priest repeating sûtras for the sake of the dying flowers; sometimes to a pining lover; sometimes to a host receiving travellers; sometimes to a blasphemer, “always beginning” to say something against the gods, but always afraid to finish it. Most of the following examples are taken from the recent book of frog-poems published by Roséki;—each paragraph of my prose rendering, it should be remembered, represents a distinct poem:—
Now all the guests being gone, why still thus respectfully sitting, O frog?
So resting your hands on the ground, do you welcome the Rain, O frog?
You disturb in the ancient well the light of the stars, O frog!
Sleepy the sound of the rain; but your voice makes me dream, O frog!
Always beginning to say something against the great Heaven, O frog!
You have learned that the world is void: you never look at it as you float, O frog!
Having lived in clear-rushing mountain-streams, never can your voice become stagnant, O frog!
The last pleasing conceit shows the esteem in which the superior vocal powers of the kajika are held.
III
I thought it strange that out of hundreds of frog-poems collected for me I could not discover a single mention of the coldness and clamminess of the frog. Except a few jesting lines about the queer attitudes sometimes assumed by the creature, the only reference to its uninviting qualities that I could find was the mild remark,
Seen in the daytime, how uninteresting you are, O frog!
While wondering at this reticence concerning the chilly, slimy, flaccid nature of frogs, it all at once occurred to me that in other thousands of Japanese poems which I had read there was a total absence of allusions to tactual sensations. Sensations of colors, sounds, and odors were rendered with exquisite and surprising delicacy; but sensations of taste were seldom mentioned, and sensations of touch were absolutely ignored. I asked myself whether the reason for this reticence or indifference should be sought in the particular temperament or mental habit of the race; but I have not yet been able to decide the question. Remembering that the race has been living for ages upon food which seems tasteless to the Western palate, and that impulses to such action as hand-clasping, embracing, kissing, or other physical display of affectionate feeling, are really foreign to far-Eastern character, one is tempted to the theory that gustatory and tactual sensations, pleasurable and otherwise, have been less highly evolved with the Japanese than with us. But there is much evidence against such a theory; and the triumphs of Japanese handicraft assure us of an almost incomparable delicacy of touch developed in special directions. Whatever be the physiological meaning of the phenomenon, its moral meaning is of most importance. So far as I have been able to judge, Japanese poetry usually ignores the inferior qualities of sensation, while making the subtlest of appeals to those superior qualities which we call æsthetic. Even if representing nothing else, this fact represents the healthiest and happiest attitude toward Nature. Do not we Occidentals shrink from many purely natural impressions by reason of repulsion developed through a morbid tactual sensibility? The question is at least worth considering. Ignoring or mastering such repulsion,—accepting naked Nature as she is, always lovable when understood,—the Japanese discover beauty where we blindly imagine ugliness or formlessness or loathsomeness,—beauty in insects, beauty in stones, beauty in frogs. Is the fact without significance that they alone have been able to make artistic use of the form of the centipede?... You should see my Kyōtō tobacco-pouch, with centipedes of gold running over its figured leather like ripplings of fire!