The Higurashi's Cry
To the people of this land, it would seem, the middle of August holds something more than a mere date upon the calendar.
Crammed into a carrying-case, I was brought to a house I had never before seen. It was, I am given to understand, the dwelling in which the Honored Mother had lived in her own childhood, together with her parents — who would be, to Miss Kodo-oba, grandparents.
Both of them have long since passed on, and no one dwells there now. It was, then, taking advantage of the summer recess granted to the Honored Father and Miss Kodo-oba, that the family had come to let the air through the place.
While I, from the corner of the room, conducted my own inspection of the premises for safety, the Honored Father, wielding an unaccustomed brush-cutter with a great roar, mowed down weeds grown taller than his own height; the Honored Mother threw open the storm shutters, drew the futons from the closet, and laid them out along the sun-warmed veranda; and Miss Kodo-oba drove off in the car to fetch provisions. By this deft division of labor, seldom witnessed in ordinary days, life returned to a vacant house haunted, until then, by nothing but ghosts.
Past the middle of the afternoon, the Honored Father, his mowing at last concluded, sat himself upon the engawa, a traditional Japanese wooden veranda, fanning himself with a paper fan as he gazed upon the mounded grass heaped where a field had once, perhaps, been tilled. It was about this time that I too concluded my inspection and took my seat beside him. An acrid smoke, of a kind I had never before encountered, assailed my nose. This, I surmised, must be what men call mosquito-coil incense.
I looked out anew upon the broad view afforded by the engawa. The garden below, buried beneath the green grass the Honored Father had heaped up, gave no clear sign of where the property itself might end, and beyond it stretched rice paddies and hills as far as the eye could see. It was a far cry indeed from the house in which I ordinarily dwell, where potted plants are crammed cheek by jowl upon a paved patch of ground scarcely larger than what we of the feline race, in an expression I find rather insulting, call “a cat’s forehead.”
But above all, the sound was different. A dry rustle of wings rubbing together. Cries of every kind. It was, in short, an overwhelming paradise of insects. And above all else, that distinctive, ringing kana-kana-kana— the cry of the higurashi, a cicada whose call is said to herald the end of summer.
“Ah, the higurashi,” said the Honored Father. “Somehow, it puts me in rather a nostalgic mood.”
“Whatever are you talking about,” said the Honored Mother, folding a futon. “Your own family home is smack in the middle of Tokyo. You haven’t a relation in the countryside to your name. You must know the higurashi only from the television.”
“That may well be so,” protested the Honored Father, “but there’s such a thing as a gen-fū-kei — a primal landscape. Things like this, surely, are carved into one’s very DNA.”
“They call that ‘anemoia,’ apparently,” put in Miss Kodo-oba, drinking a bottle of ramune in the depths of the room. The glass marble inside the bottle gave a clinking rattle as it rolled. “Americans, born and raised in America, apparently feel ‘nostalgic’ looking at Japanese landscapes they’ve only ever seen in anime.”
“Don’t lump me in with the Americans,” the Honored Father’s protest continued.
That such an emotion is called nostalgia — a longing for things past — is, of course, a fact known to us of the feline race, solely as an intellectual concept. There is said to exist some paradox involving a cat and one Schrödinger, but we cats are, at bottom, creatures that live forever in the present moment. A longing for the past is thus, as a concept, one we find difficult to grasp. And yet, were the Honored Father merely recalling his own childhood, I could understand it well enough — I myself am not without memory of certain afternoons spent tussling with my littermates in my kittenhood. But what of the Honored Father’s case here? At the mere sound of the higurashi’s cry, a feeling of nostalgia wells up within him — for an experience he has never once had. This may run parallel to the mystery of the Honored Mother, who eats watermelon though she does not even like it. Why should the mere hearing of a sound spontaneously conjure up the emotion called nostalgia?
Upon this riddle, of no concern whatsoever to one such as myself who lives always in the present, I resolved to attempt some consideration, even as I groomed myself.
Scenery Designed to Be Missed
The first explanation, touched upon a little already, is historical and cultural. The people of these islands have, over long ages, polished the scenery into a symbol reflecting the human heart. The landscape is no mere backdrop, but the very protagonist. And this scenery encompasses not sight alone, but hearing and smell besides. Indeed, a poet of more than a thousand years past composed a verse of just this kind — that though the calendar declared autumn to have come, nothing of autumn was visible to the eye, summer lingering everywhere in sight; and yet, in the sound of the wind and the touch of it upon the skin, the poet was startled to find the unmistakable presence of autumn already there. The verse runs thus:
Aki kinu to me ni wa sayaka ni mienedomo kaze no oto ni zo odorokarenuru
秋来ぬと 目にはさやかに 見えねども 風の音にぞ 驚かれぬる
Here, sensory perception and the emotion it evokes are sung as a single, indivisible whole. To us of the feline race this is difficult to grasp — though perhaps it resembles the way the faintest rustle of an insect’s wing instantly flips a cat’s hunting switch.
The courtiers, in their utmost refinement, brought forth a still deeper poignancy through this double-exposure of landscape and sentiment. In it may be seen the passage of the seasons, and the corresponding movement of the heart. This system of symbols, changing its outward form across the ages, was handed down unbroken, until at last it came to be reflected even in the backgrounds of animated films — mastered so thoroughly, indeed, as to seem second nature.
The moving image cannot direct its effects at smell, touch, or taste, but it can act upon sight and sound. And so, through unwitting and continuous exposure to this cultural apparatus, even a man such as the Honored Father — a middle-aged man nearing retirement who, unlike myself, has never once chased a dragonfly — finds the pre-installed switch of nostalgia within him duly flipped at the mere sound of the higurashi‘s cry. The Honored Father’s protest that it is “carved into his DNA” is, scientifically speaking, a most dubious claim; and yet, in a cultural sense, it is not so wide of the mark as it might seem. What is carved into his DNA is not any memory of having heard the higurashi‘s cry, but the symbolic system of these islands themselves — a system meticulously engineered through the ages to make one long for the higurashi.
Borrowed Fragments
The second explanation is psychological. It is true that the Honored Father can only ever have heard the higurashi’s cry by way of the television. But he can hardly be a stranger to the merciless glare of a summer afternoon, or the close, muggy smell of grass. That is to say: though he has never experienced the whole of a rural Japanese summer, he has already experienced the “fragments” that compose it. In this way, it would seem, humans use such shared fragments as a trigger, recall scenes and feelings from their own past, projecting them onto the fiction before them.
The Shortcut Through the Nose
The third explanation is neuroscientific. The sense of smell connects directly to the limbic system — to the amygdala, which governs the emotions, and to the hippocampus, where memory is formed and fixed. Scent, in other words, is a medium capable of shaking loose emotion and memory directly, bypassing the frontal lobe — the very seat of reason. It is no wonder, then, that I myself, upon smelling the newly cut grass a while ago — though I cannot say I grew nostalgic for it — found myself recalling my own kittenhood. Did not one Monsieur Proust, too, open the door to memories past by way of the taste and smell of a madeleine dipped in tea? How much more so, then, the Honored Father. That the memories and feelings once bound up with the smell of cut grass — the particular nature of which I cannot begin to guess — should be suddenly reawakened here is nothing to marvel at.
The Fusion of the Three
When these three forces fuse together — a sort of ‘demon fusion,’ if you will — the result, summoned forth by whatever the five senses happen to catch, is a phantom nostalgia that, by all rights, should not exist at all, yet is conjured up within the brain regardless.
It would not do to dismiss the Honored Father, declaring himself “nostalgic” at the mere cry of the higurashi, as simply a man easily swept along. Historical and cultural pressures more than a thousand years in the making bear down upon him from every direction. Given as much, even so unscientific a piece of nonsense as “carved into my DNA” ought perhaps to be forgiven him. The Honored Father, even now, is measuring with a ruler the diameter of the opening of his emptied ramune bottle against the glass marble within, calculating the approximate internal pressure of the vessel.
The smoke of the mosquito coil trails white across the engawa, gilded by the slanting light.
Imagining the humans, each within their own skull, earnestly consuming a “homeland they never possessed,” I found myself wishing to consider, a little further, this other strange fever of summer that drives men to distraction — the thing they call nostalgia.
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