A Bell Cricket

Onomatopoeia & Polly Barton's Fifty Sounds

I’d been living in Tokyo about ten years, when a friend’s father decided to perform a little experiment on me. Arriving one cool autumn evening at their home in suburban Mejirodai, he waved my friend away, telling her: “I want to have a little chat with Leanne.” Sitting down on the sofa across from him, he poured me a cup of tea. In truth, I can’t recall what we chatted about, but about twenty minutes into the conversation, he suddenly clasped his hand together in delight–with what could only be described as a childlike gleam in his eyes– and said, “Don’t you hear something?”

I was puzzled by this sudden turn of events. I sat quietly for a moment, listening– and then shook my head, no.

He was incredulous (but I couldn’t help but feel he also looked quite pleased with himself) and said: “Are you telling me that you have noticed nothing unusual here this evening?” He cupped his hand around his right ear as if making to try and hear a faint sound.

When I shook my head again, he giddily pulled out a small bamboo cage from under his chair. I immediately realized that he had a bell cricket in there. In fact, the cricket was chirping quite loudly!

How on earth had I missed it?

Seeing my look of distress, he explained “Japanese people process the sound of insects using the same side of their brain as they do language. In contrast, foreigners” –small nod in my direction —“process it on the other side of the brain, as a kind of background noise.

“We Japanese hear the singing crickets as music.” He told me about a recent academic paper on this very subject.

My friend Chieko was now downstairs, listening from the corner of the room, rolling her eyes dramatically.

What could I say? I simply didn’t “hear” it.

Even if I had heard it, English does not have Japanese word equivalents that evoke the ringing, chirping and clicking sounds of the individual insects. In Japanese, while a bell cricket sings rin, rin, rin, a giant katydid goes gacha-gacha, gacha-gacha. While the pine cricket chirps, chin-chiro chin-chiro chin-chiro-rin. How can you really notice things when you don’t have a vocabulary for it? An American friend once wondered if listening and hearing things…as well as anything beyond a very base emotional response to our "environment" (broadly speaking) depends on a vocabulary for expressing it?

I wondered too.

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I think this deep attentiveness to the natural world could be one reason why Japanese is so rich in mimetic words.  Sometimes called onomatopoeia. These are words that mimic sounds, like boom! Or meow and tick-tock. Japanese has three to five times as many of these mimetic terms as any of the Indo-European languages, with the only language in the world that has more such words being Korean.

They are widely used—from casual conversation to serious news programs, from comics to literature. In her book Fifty Sounds, translator Polly Barton calls them “the beating heart of Japanese.” I agree.

Onomatopoeia are the words you sing to your children or are the words always used in novels to evoke a nuanced feeling. They populate manga and anime and evoke embodied sound in poetry. Someday, when Japanese fades in my mind over time, I am sure onomatopoeia will remain after everything else is long forgotten.

Frogs sing kero kero

Headaches hurt gan gan

To smile is niko-niko

To be excited is waku waku

To stare is jiro jiro

And of course, I will never forget how Shindo-san’s little bell cricket went rin rin.

Read entire essay at 3 Quarks Daily

Song 虫のこえ

虫のこえ (Mushi no Koe) lyrics (Thank you Mama Lisa)
Books:

• Eigojin to Nihongojin no tame no Nihongo gitaigo jiten An illustrated dictionary of Japanese onomatopoeic expressions (Japanese Edition)
  Gomi, Taro [One of the first books I bought in Japan!]

• Jazz Up Your Japanese with Onomatopoeia, Hiroko Fukuda

• Onomata pera pera Mizuno Ryotaro (Japan News)

• Fifty Sounds: A Memoir, by Polly Barton (wonderful review by Yui Kajita in Hopscotch)

• “Listening: Research as an Act of Mindfulness” by Kumi Kato, in Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene