You ARE a Cricket. You ARE a Grasshopper.

Okay, last week in class we read Kawabata's "The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket". While the story had a deep cultural and (supposedly) romantic significance, I'm not going to talk about that. Instead, I am going to discuss the situation overall. So first, let's look at the fact that the narrator is presumably not a kid. He's just kind of sitting in the bushes watching children catch bugs and introduce their latest lanterns to their friends. That is, without a doubt, extremely weird. I would actually argue that it would be weird for a kid to sit in the bushes and do this, too. That being said, the narrator could be like 16 and the rest of the kids who are catching bugs, are like 10, but that is irrelevant. The part that gets me is the fact the main boy uses a bug to impress the girl he likes. Maybe it's a cultural thing, or maybe it's just me, but if someone was like, "as a token of my appreciation, I want to give you this gift" and then they handed me a bell cricket, I would probably scream. ( I feel like I should clarify that I would not be screaming because I was disappointed and being ungrateful for the gift, but rather because I really do not like bugs.) Furthermore, I thought it was kind of weird that the boy wasn't just upfront about giving her the cricket. He went about it in this really roundabout way where he asked everyone if they wanted a grasshopper (which of course every bug-catching kid is going to want) and then keeps asking it until the girl he likes says yes, and then once he gives it to her, IT ISN'T EVEN A GRASSHOPPER!  Now, I get the concept behind the crickets and the cultural significance behind them, but really? Why go through all the trouble of doing that when he could have just given her the cricket? It just seems impractical to me. Furthermore, the comparison is made that someone you view as a grasshopper might actually be a cricket, and someone you view as a cricket might actually be a grasshopper. How do you know which you are? The answer is that you don't, and you never will because (at least the way I perceive it) this comparison is strictly based in other people's opinions of you. You might very well view yourself as a cricket (AS YOU SHOULD!!) but someone with different interests or views from you might see you as a grasshopper. I could be going about this the wrong way, but biologically speaking I don't see that much of a difference between the two bugs? Comparing the two insects, crickets have longer antenna, grasshoppers are green and brown while crickets tend to be black or gray, and crickets produce the chirping sound they make with their wings rather than with their legs like grasshoppers do. So I guess the moral of the story is to think of yourself as a cricket, because even if someone views you as a grasshopper, they aren't all that different, and other people's opinions don't matter.

Also, from an observatory standpoint only, grasshoppers are far more visually appealing than crickets. Just Saying.