[Illustration]
“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?”