The Grasshopper and the Bell-Cricket

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of suicide.

Yasunari Kawabata was born in Osaka, Japan, on June 11, 1899. Both of his parents died by the time he was four years old, and he was raised in the country by his grandparents. His grandmother died when he was seven, and his only sister died when he was nine. When his grandfather died in 1915, Kawabata moved to a middle school dormitory.

This turbulent and sad childhood likely contributed to the themes of isolation, melancholy, and loneliness in Kawabata’s literature. In “The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket,” happy childhood scenes are revered as “fairy tale”-like (Paragraph 2), which suggests that idyllic childhood is not realistic or that it was not realistic for him. It is viewed with a sense of longing and both physical distance as an onlooker and distance as the narrator thinking to himself rather than conversing with other characters, illustrating an awareness of idyllic childhood but also a notion that it was out of his grasp. The juxtaposition of idealism and beauty next to sadness and isolation are consistent themes throughout his body of work.

Kawabata was a central figure in the development of Japanese literary Modernism. With his friend Riichi Yokomitsu and others, he founded a movement known as Shinkankakuha (“new impressions” or “new perceptions”), which stood in opposition to both the staid traditions of Japanese Naturalism and the rising tide of Marxist-inspired Social Realism. Strongly influenced by European Modernists, writers in this movement sought to capture the dynamism of a rapidly changing Japan. In 1968, Kawabata became the first Japanese winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. His Nobel Lecture, “Japan, the Beautiful and Myself,” details his cultural aesthetic as it pertains to the arts. He identifies topics such as Zen Buddhism, ink painting, and bonsai gardening as cultural examples that are rooted in simplicity and isolation yet yield exquisite beauty. He also mentions the note that short story writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) left before his death by suicide, highlighting that while he had lost the will to live, he found nature more beautiful than ever. This is another example of intense love and admiration of beauty and the natural world juxtaposed with extreme emotional loneliness.

Yasunari Kawabata died by apparent suicide in 1972, two years after the suicide of his close friend, the writer Yukio Mishima. Some believe that Kawabata’s death, by gas inhalation, may have been accidental.