The Grasshopper and the Cricket (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Yasunari Kawabata
- First Published: 1924
- Type of Plot: Fable
- Time of Work: The early twentieth century
- Setting: A university town in Japan
- Principal Characters: The unnamed narrator, Fujio, Kiyoko
- Genres: Fable, Short fiction
- Subjects: Children, Japan or Japanese people, Insects, Fables, Grasshoppers, Lamps
- Locales: Japan
The Story
Walking along the wall of a university, the narrator hears an insect's voice from behind the fence of a school playground. The fence gives way to an embankment, at the base of which the narrator sees a cluster of bobbing, multicolored lanterns.
The narrator now imagines that one of the neighborhood children, having heard an insect sing on the slope one night, returns the next night to search for the insect. The next night, another child joins the first one, and so on. When the narrator comes on the insect hunting party, he counts twenty children among its...
[The entire page is 1408 words long]
