Insect Music: Lafcadio Hearn’s Orphean Song 24

--why European poets, during the last two thousand years have written so little upon the subject of insects?

Lafcadio Hearn, “Some Poems about Insects”²⁵

Lafcadio Hearn went to Japan in 1890 as a reporter commissioned by Harper’s Weekly. He had just published Two Years in the French West Indies, a travelogue based on his Martinique experiences which received good reviews. After having worked as a journalist, literary editor, book reviewer, and translator for twenty years in Cincinnati and New Orleans as well as Martinique, he was determined to become an independent writer and explore a new literary territory. Japan was his next material. His initial plan was to spend a year or two gathering information for his book, but he ended up spending the rest of his life there. He found a teaching position, first at Matsue Ordinary Middle School, then at the Fifth Higher Middle School in Kumamoto, later at Tokyo Imperial University, and lastly at Waseda University. Moving around in Japan such a way, his Japanese experience literally ranged from the small Japanese ancient city of Matsue to the modern Westernized capital of Tokyo. He married a Japanese, learned old Japanese tales, customs and habits, and published eleven books on Japan. Those books earned him the reputation of a Japanologist rather than a literary writer;

however, his life-long goal was to become a prose-poet who could evoke in his writing the spirit of a place. His essays are descriptive and exact, reflecting his training as a journalist in his youth, but they are also crafted and suggestive. His Japanese experience inspired him and, as will be discussed in this paper, made him search for an Orphean voice. Hearn worked on a metaphorical form of the essay in which both ancient and

24 This section was originally published in Lafcadio Hearn in International Perspectives, ed. Sukehiro Hirakawa, ISBN9781905246267 (Folkestone, Global Oriental, 2007) 139-151. As I have reprinted this section as it was in the original, some descriptions may overlap with those in other parts of this monograph.

25 Complete Lectures on Poetry, 413.

modern voices could mingle, turning an old story into a modern allegory and bringing the dead back to life through his narrative.

Curiously, one particular literary subject that Hearn favoured was the insect. His interest in insects can be traced back to his early American days; he wrote newspaper and magazine articles on both entomological and literary issues. In Japan, he discovered the aesthetic appreciation of listening to insects, and considered the insect to be a suitable subject for modern poetry. This paper will chronologically examine Hearn’s insect writings and the transformations of his treatment of the insect as an object of observation and as a literary subject. As early as 1876, he reported on an exhibition of butterflies with vivid colour descriptions in the Cincinnati newspaper. In his 1884 magazine articles on the New Orleans World Exposition, he admired the Japanese display of handcrafted miniature insects. In the essays and lectures of his Japanese period, from 1890 to 1904, the insect was no more a simple object of observation and curiosity, it became a compound metaphor to render both aesthetic and ethical aspects of culture. He wrote his books in English, and most of them were published in the US and some in UK. His works were also translated into several European languages, such as Finish, French and German.²⁶ To his Western readers, Hearn introduced the Japanese custom of listening to insect-music²⁷ as an example of an aesthetic sensibility which the West had yet to learn. To his Japanese students, he lectured on insect poetry, comparing cultural and literary histories in the East and the West, and pointed out that both the old Greeks and the Japanese wrote poetry about “musical insects, crickets, cicadæ,” underlining the long tradition of the Japanese insect poetry (“Some Poems about Insects” 289)²⁸.

26 Sections from The Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan were translated into Finnish as early as 1896.

Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (1896) into German and Dutch in 1905, French and Polish in 1906, Italian and Spanish in 1907, and Hungarian in 1909. See Lafcadio Hearn: a Bibliography of His Writings, P. D. and lone Perkins (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1934).

27 Appreciation of singing insects is a shared custom in both China and Japan. In China, during the Tang Dynasty (618-906) they began to keep crickets in order to enjoy their chirping and, under the Sung (960-279), the sport of cricket fights was developed, although the latter custom did not root in Japan; see Berthold Laufer and Lafcadio Hearn, Insect Musicians & Cricket Champions: A Cultural History of Singing Insects in China and Japan, ed., Lisa Ryan Gail (1996).

28 Hearn’s lectures were dictated by his students and were later collected and published; see ‘Tōdai kōgi [Tokyo University lectures]; Koizumi Yakumo Jiten [Reader’s Guide to Lafcadio Hearn], comp.

Hirakawa (2000), 399-400.

“Butterflies”

In his American writings, Hearn especially excelled in microscopic descriptions.

Edwin Henderson, the editor of the Cincinnati Commercial, thought that Hearn was gifted and could use his language “as polished and as full of colour as if it had come from the pen of Gautier.” Hearn’s “Butterfly Fantasies” (9 May 1876) is such an example of a vivid and colourful presentation after Gautier who was one of young Hearn’s literary inspirations.²⁹

In this article, Hearn gives a report on an entomological exhibition and describes the colours, shapes and sizes of butterflies collected from all over the world.³⁰ He calls the beauty of their wings as ‘Nature’s painting’ and names the colours to present its

‘artistic design’: “Combinations of gold, with a gleam of green; of blue, with silvery veins; of scarlet, with ermine white; of ebony black, with flaming yellow; of onyx colour, with purple-edged dots of brown; of blood red,” and these colours “scintillated, shone, flashed” (“Butterfly Fantasies 191-192). He enjoys depicting the insects as if he were an illustrator of a coloured picture book. As a reporter at a scientific exhibition, he must be objectively accurate in his delineation but does not have to be worried about the meaning of the “Nature’s painting.” He freely takes advantage of the opportunity and experiments with his language to produce true-to-nature but lusciously aesthetic effects.

Hearn’s article, however, is not a mere (dis)play of colours; it testifies to his realization that no matter how he tries to hold up a transparent mirror against “Nature,”

his mirror is warped by his preconception. When he comes across one ‘grotesque’ moth, colours suddenly fade away and it immediately reminds him of its other name used by the superstitious English peasant “the death’s head.” Then, he starts making associations, with the image: “its wings have the richness of costly funeral trappings; its back bears plainly painted, in the yellowish colour of moldering bone, the hideous outlines of an eyeless and gibbering skull” (192). In the paradisiacal world of “aerial graces” of butterflies, he encounters death, and the article bespeaks a conventional moral, memento mori, whose message is reinforced by the use of words such as

29 See Murray, 28.

30 The article is based on Hearn’s visit to Charles Dury Museum, Cincinnati; see ‘Afterword.’ Chōno Gensōo [Butterfly Fantasies], trans. Nagasawa Sumio (Tokyo: Tsukiji shoten, 1988), 277.

“funeral” and “skull.” The change of tone also betrays the rapture in the narrator’s point of view; while he tries to illustrate the entomological exhibit as an objective, moral-free, and artistic reporter, he cannot do away with his tendency to apply a known maxim to humanize the natural phenomenon.

He feels refreshed, however, on entering the Oriental section because he is able to admire the beauty of the insects, forgetting the haunting image of death: “To turn from this grotesque insect to the spiritually delicate butterflies of China and Japan was something of a relief” (192). He once again plays with the colours and makes aesthetic associations, linking one pattern to another. A different atmosphere provides him with a different emotion. He thus imagines a correspondence between a people’s character and their environment: “the nature of a race is molded by the nature of the climate of their land; that their arts and customs are strongly influenced by the conditions of their atmosphere; that their tastes are developed in accordance with the peculiarities of their natural surroundings” (193). The discovery was liberating, since, in the case of the Japanese, he assumes the correspondence to be spiritual and aesthetic. Wings of the Japanese butterflies, therefore, remind him of the patterns on the Japanese fans: “One, a Japanese butterfly, bore upon its wings in scarlet and pale blue, mingled with touches of white, an exact counterpart of a favorite sky-design on Japanese fans” (192-193). The Oriental section, moreover, excites him because he also discovers the privilege of being a stranger. He feels that there is no need to be obsessed by the preconceived moral framework of his Western mind. The position of a stranger, in other words, enables him to become a fanciful ethnographer of culture.

For young Hearn, Japan was a remote and exotic world. He filled up its unknown space with his imagination and fancied a world of beauty which he believed could no longer exist in the Western hemisphere. “Butterfly Fantasies” foretells Hearn’s desire to find the Orient, namely Japan, as an ideal literary Utopia where he can let his language freely fly. Two decades later, in one of his Tokyo Imperial University lectures, he refers to the butterfly as an important metaphor for the spirit in both Western and Japanese poetry. His idea of insects gradually matured throughout his career as he learned more about insects in both literature and science.³¹ Before going into a discussion of Hearn’s

31 Since Hearn’s knowledge of insects was such, not only Japanese literary writers but also scientists have shown great interest in his insect writings. Nagasawa Sumio who translated and edited Hearn’s stories and essays about insects is a scholar of entomology and agriculture. Konishi Masayasu, another well-known entomologist, wrote “Koizumi Yakumo to Mushi [Koizumi Yakumo and Insects],” Rekishi to Jinbutsu [History and Famous Figures] (1975), 24-6; he also refers to Hearn in his Mushi no Bunkashi [History of

literary achievements in Japan, his view of Japanese art in relation to insects first needs to be examined.

Cotton Insects

Hearn welcomed entomological discoveries of his day, and thought that they would break the spell of old superstitions and beliefs about insects. He was especially impressed by the communal life of insects described in Jules Michelet’s L’Insecte and wrote an article in 1882 entitled, “News about Ants.” Hearn spotlighted Michelet’s account on ‘the Republic of the Ants’ and introduced the life of ants as organized as

“the ideal Greek republics” (Occidental Gleanings 2 51). He also learned that they had a highly developed sensitivity. Knowing entomological discoveries of his day, Hearn assumed that, as far as the evolution of the conscious was concerned, insects might be more advanced than humans; therefore, they were moral-free but orderly, and sentiment-free but supersensitive. In Hearn’s logic, they were ethical because they were devoid of egoistic desires.³² When he saw beautifully crafted imitation Japanese insects, he immediately associated Japanese culture with both of his ideal models of insects and ancient Greece.

In 1885, Hearn wrote a series of reports on the New Orleans Exposition.³³ His articles on the Japanese exhibit show his excitement at witnessing a happy marriage between old tradition and modern technology. He examines the display of printed books which are overlooked by most visitors and expresses his admiration at the level of the Japanese technology which is comparable with any Western counterpart.³⁴ Such modern features in the Japanese exhibit dispel the fixed notion of Japan as the exotic

Insect Ethnography] (1992). Ushimura Kei describes Hearn’s point of view as ‘that of a scientist’; see

‘Mushi Mezuru Hahn [Insect Appreciating Hearn],’ Hikaku Bungaku Kenkyu [Studies in Comparative Literature], vol. 47 (1985), 162.

32 Hearn also refers to the ecology of insects as a model of an ethical community in his lecture

‘Beyond Man,’ Complete Lectures on Art, Literature and Philosophy, ed., Ryuji Tanabe, T. Ochiai and I.

Nishizaki (1932), 237-44.

33 One article was published in the Times-Democrat, “Oriental Literature at the Exposition” (24 February 1885); four in the Harper’s Weekly, “The New Orleans Exposition: The Japanese Exhibit” (31 January 1885), “The East at New Orleans” (7 March 1885), “Mexico at New Orleans,” (14 March 1885),

“Some Oriental Curiosities” (28 March 1885), and “The Government Exhibit at New Orleans” (11 April 1885); and another in the Harper’s Bazaar, “Notes of a Curiosity-Hunter” (4 April 1885).

34 See “Oriental Literature at the Exposition,” Oriental Articles, ed., Ichiro Nishizaki (1939), 149.

Other but allow Japan to claim its presence in the civilized modern world. Hearn finds two particular items in the exhibit, crafted “cotton” insects and a musical instrument very similar to “the ancient Greek seven-stringed lyre,” which perfectly proved his belief in aesthetic and ethical Japan (Occidental Gleanings 2 227).³⁵

The “cotton” insects are especially, the objects of his wonder, and he reveres the subtlety of Japanese craftsmanship on two levels: that they are able to produce such skillful miniatures, and that they are attentive even to the smallest elements of their exhibition:

[The bugs and beetles] are so life-like that you may actually weigh one in your hand a moment before you find that it is made of cotton. . . There are cotton crickets with the lustre of lacquer, and cotton grasshoppers of many colors; the korogi, whose singing is like to the sound of a weaver, weaving rapidly (‘ko-ro-ru, ko-ro-ru’), and the kirigiri, whose name is an imitation of its own note. (212)

The “cotton” insects are “so life-like” not only because they represent the anatomical exactness but also because they bear a sense of life in motion and appear as if they might at any moment “fly away” and start singing in silvery chorus. He intuits that the essence of such craftsmanship is “movement”: “What Japanese art of the best era is unrivaled in—that characteristic in which, according even to the confession of the best French art connoisseurs, it excels all other art—is movement, the rhythm, the poetry, of visible motion” (211). Japanese craftsmanship captures the lively vibrations of the “cotton” insects. In ‘Butterfly Fancies,’ Hearn experimented with his language to illustrate colorful designs of butterflies; now, he discovers that the Japanese are able to express the ‘visible motion’ of the passing moment in the static art forms.

The craftsmanship of the “cotton” insect is factual evidence for Hearn that Japanese art is the product not of imitation but of recreation of the prime moment of life.

In his 1898 essay, “About Faces in Japanese Art,” he describes that, while Western painting focuses on imitation and particular characteristics, Japanese painting on

35 In the same article, Hearn refers to a report on Japanese music written by Isawa Shūji whose investigations were conducted by order of the Japanese Minister of Education, Ōki Takatō. Hearn quotes from Isawa: ‘There is no scale in the Japanese classical or popular music which may not be found in Greek music’ (pp. 227-8).

idealism and the general law of form registered in the painter’s “memory” (116). He also explains the long apprenticeship period that is required for a Japanese craftsman to master one brushstroke, a fleeting movement that appears effortless and spontaneous.

He describes how such a drawing is made:

The Japanese artist depicts an insect, for example, as no European artist can do:

he makes it live; he shows its peculiar motion, its character, everything by which it is at once distinguished as a type, —and all this with a few brush-strokes. But he does not attempt to represent every vein upon each of its wings, every separate joint of its antennæ: he depicts it as it is really seen at a glance, not as studied in detail. We never see all the details of the body of a grasshopper, a butterfly, or a bee, in the moment that we perceive it perching somewhere; we observe only enough to enable us to decide what kind of creature it is. We see the typical, never the individual peculiarities. (107)

Living in Japan, Hearn comes to value a sense of the passing moment as an important subject of art. In the Western way of realism, an artist will immobilize an object in order to depict it from a fixed perspective. Hearn, however, learns that an artist does not have to be concerned with anatomical particulars and there is no need to dissect to kill to capture reality; all he has to do is to register the impression of the moment. The fact that he refers to the insect as an example in the above passage is significant, because it announces the insect as a representative subject matter in Japanese art. In poetry, he also learns that the custom of listening to the insect-music and composing poems about it has been a most cherished aesthetic pastime for the Japanese for more than one thousand years. From Hearn’s Western point of view, however, the insect theme is a discovery.

Insect Musicians

In one of his lectures at Tokyo Imperial University, “Old Greek Poetry about Insects,” Hearn introduces Greek insect poetry and explains how the Greeks’

appreciation of the insects is similar to that of the Japanese. He categorizes Greek insect poetry into three classes, “cicadæ, musical grasshoppers, and some kinds of night crickets” and contends that the three correspond exactly to the classes of “Japanese Musical Insects” (Complete Lectures on Poetry 439). His reference to ancient Greek

poetry enables him to define Japanese culture as equally significant and worthy of respect by Westerners. The more he learned about the insect as a theme in Japanese art, the more it became valuable for him to revive in his writing. With his knowledge in both literatures of poetry and of science, he regarded the insect theme as a useful compound metaphor which would superimposedly project both literary (non-material) and scientific (material) aspects of culture.

“Insect-Musicians” (1898) is an example of Hearn’s attempt to write a philosophical essay on culture which is at once literary and scientific, or poetic and socio-historical, naturalistic, poetic, and critical. In this essay, Hearn uses a Japanese poem as an epigraph and guides his readers to learn how to read its hidden meaning.

For this purpose, he provides the readers with detailed accounts of the history of the insect-music and its literary tradition in Japan. The prefacing poem is also followed by his own translation:

Mushi yo mushi, Naïté ingwa ga Tsukuru nara?

‘O insect, insect! --think you that Karma can be exhausted by song?’— (9:30) The narrator talks about his experience of purchasing an insect at a night festival.

A connoisseur of Japanese culture, he knowingly introduces the history of the Japanese custom of keeping insects as pets as well as the history of the insect business. In the manner of a naturalist, he categorizes the insects, explains their characteristics, supplies them with their scientific names and life-size illustrations, transcribes their sounds, lists their prices, and complements all of this with Japanese insect poems. After having spent about forty pages on socio-historical, scientific, and literary portraiture of insects, the narrator reintroduces the previously cited poem. The poem, therefore, must be read again anew with some knowledge of Japanese cultural background in order to construe the ‘indirect double-suggestiveness’ of the poem.

The narrator tries out his interpretation: “The Western reader would probably suppose that the insect-condition, or insect-state-of-being, is here referred to; but the real thought of the speaker, presumably a woman, is that her own sorrow is the result of faults committed in former lives, and is therefore impossible to alleviate” (107). The poem not only expresses the speaker’s sorrow but also carries the echoes of the “revival of ancestral pain” and “inherited . . . memories” of the race. Being exposed to Japanese

culture, the narrator’s Western mind is challenged. He humbly admits that the Japanese know not only how to enjoy “insect-music” but also how to respond to the “sorrow” of the race which is vibratingly transmitted in its tone. Such sensibility, which responds to the vicissitudes of life, he calls “an aesthetic sensibility,” and regrettably declares that it has been left “unexplored” in the West (41).³⁶

The ideal Japanese “aesthetic sensibility,” however, may soon be extinct. Hearn was clearly aware of the rapid process of Westernization in Japan. He concludes

“Insect-Music” with his critique of modern culture:

Surely we have something to learn from the people in whose mind the simple chant of a cricket can awaken whole fairy-swarms of tender and delicate fancies.

We may boast of being their masters in the mechanical, their teachers of the artificial in all its varieties of ugliness; but in the knowledge of the natural, in the feeling of the joy and beauty of earth, they exceeded us like the Greeks of old. Yet perhaps it will be only when our blind aggressive industrialism has wasted and sterilized their paradise . . . that we shall begin with remorseful amazement to comprehend the charm of that which we destroyed. (80)

His reference to ancient Greece here adds an elegiac tone. The ideal ancient Greek culture perished, and so would be the fate for Japanese culture. Using the editorial “we,”

Hearn places himself as one of the “aggressive” Westerners. No matter how he tries to live a Japanese way of life and learn their “aesthetic sensibility,” he is a stranger representing the powers of Western modernization.

“The Insect-Musicians,” nevertheless, is a testimony of Hearn’s compassionate response to the kind of Japanese sensibility that could pity an insect, because it was believed to have a soul of its own and shared the same fate as humans. From Hearn’s vantage point as a Western outsider in Japanese society, he was able to observe the idiosyncratic nature of the Japanese sensibility, very different from the Western one, and discerned the formula of the “indirect double-suggestiveness” in an innocuous

36 Hearn here observes that the Japanese listen to the chirping of the insect as if it were a language. In 1978, an audiologist Tadanobu Tsunoda put forth a theory which would scientifically prove Hearn’s view.

Based on his experimental data on brain dominance patterns of sound registration, Tsunoda categorizes the brain function in two patterns, “Japanese” and “Western,” and says that the “Japanese” pattern processes the chirping of crickets as a verbal sound in the left brain, while the “Western” one as a non-verbal sound in the right brain. He contends that the linguistic/cultural environment in the early stage of brain formation determines the pattern and that there is a correlation between brain and culture; see The Japanese Brain (1985), 74-86.