ANALYSIS
THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE BELL CRICKET
BY: YASUNARI KAWABATA

”The grasshopper and the bell cricket” is a short story, written by Yasunari Kawabata, written in a narrative perspective of someone watching children searching for insects using colored and decorated lanterns. I would like to think that the author is trying to symbolize life, and that it is not only one path to go. We are all aiming for acceptance and to fit in to the society, but this story tells us that

The author, who put himself as narrator, describes how he walks through the halls of the university and approaches the upper school and its playground, and he seems to get so emotionally attached that he cannot take another turn. “I turned right so as not to leave the playground behind. Kawabata writes, “When I turned to the left, the fence gave way to an embankment planted with orange trees”. The color orange usually symbolize a warning, danger or something strong.

Later on Kawabata describes a group of young children that are searching for insects with lanterns in bright colors as crimson, pink, indigo, green purple and yellow. This probably is a way of describing different personalities; to clarify this Kawabata also writes, “the candle’s light seemed to emanate from the form and color of the design itself." This is probably also one of the reasons to why the author chose to write about children to symbolize how we easily forms after our surroundings and how we think things should be. Each day the children made new lanterns out of “heart and mind” and each night they went out on a insect hunt with their lanterns that brought out the shadows of the bushes, were “an insects voice could be heard” Kawabata notes.

This is when the symbolism of the grasshopper and the bell cricket comes to a meaning. A boy, who had been looking in bushes away from the other children, founds a