“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:—