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.