Kawabata’s use of colorful imagery provides a delightful reading experience for those of us who enjoy romantic literature. He considered the collection, Tales to Hold in the Palm of Your Hand, to be "miniature works of art".(Nextext) Let us explore Kawabata’s use of such ingenious romantic symbolism within, "The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket", as he searches for love, beauty, and harmony.

In summary, this story tells a tale, of a university student walking along, when he hears the voice of an insect. Enjoying the song of the insect, he happens upon a group of children with beautiful lanterns out searching for insects. While the children are hunting insects, a boy finds a ‘grasshopper’, and continues to ask if anyone would like a ‘grasshopper’, until the voice of a certain girl exclaims that, "Yes", she wants the grasshopper. Carefully the boy captures the insect and releases it to the girl. Surprisingly, the ‘grasshopper’ is actually a much sought after ‘bell cricket’. This new discovery delights the little girl, and then the narrator realizes that the little boy must have known all along that he had found a ‘bell cricket’, and was saving it for that particular girl.

Consider that Kawabata placed himself as the mysterious narrator of this short story. Knowing that he grieved from a lonely existence longing to be loved, one can see how he wished himself across the threshold of youth, as seen in the first paragraph, when the narrator peers "Behind the white board fence..." Also, he is symbolizing the children and all their splendor as he watches them, making reference in the second paragraph, to the "…bobbing cluster of beautiful varicolored lanterns, such as one might see at a festival in a remote country village." He seems to continue with this fascination of innocence in the last sentence of the second paragraph, "The bobbing lanterns, the coming together of children on this lonely slope—surely it was a scene from a fairy tale?"

The infatuations of youth are often fleeting. The third paragraph notes, "The child with the red lantern discarded it as a tasteless object that could be bought at a store. The child who had made his own lantern threw it away because the design was too simple. The pattern of light that one had had in hand