静けさや 岩に染み入る せみの声
Oh, what quietness! Penetrating through the rocks The cicada's cry
The above poem is a famous example of a haiku written by Matsuo Basho. I first encountered it when I was quite young, and for many years, it puzzled me. I had heard cicada cry before and knew they could be quite loud, but not to the level where they could 'penetrate through the rocks' I had seen as a child... And anyway, how could there be such stillness?!? The real answers did not come until I actually spent several years in Japan.
The first part of the answer came to me during my first trip to Japan in the summer of 1985. I had just graduated from college the winter before, and sold my original comic book collection to pay for a trip to Japan. That summer, I visited Hiroshima for a week. My acquaintance there was a high school teacher who let me stay in his guest room. He had a son in college who was home for summer vacation and a daughter in high school. I sometimes practiced English with them, but for the most part we spoke Japanese.
Hiroshima, if you're not familiar with the city, is on the coast on Honshu (the largest island of the four major islands of Japan) and surrounded by mountains on three sides. My host and his family lived in 'the suburbs' around Hiroshima, which basically meant he lived on the side of a mountain and not in the super-congested downtown area. The Japanese make use of almost every inch of land they can, so the house sat on a man-made concrete-reinforced platform to keep it level. (I am not sure, but there may have been some earthquake-resistant engineering built into the platform as well.)
Near my host's home there was a public tennis court; the daughter suggested we play a game of tennis to pass the time. (She was a member of the tennis club at her school.) She and her brother accompanied me to the tennis court, and on our way there we had to pass through a graveyard. I noticed during our walk through the land of the dead that it was fairly littered with statues, somewhat like the graveyards I had seen in the U.S., but on a grander scale. Quite of few of them were fairly new, too. "Victim of radiation poisoning," one slab said. Another nearby also mentioned the A-bomb explosion that obliterated most of the city back in 1945. I was sure quite a few of the people buried here were A-bomb-related deaths, whether from the explosion itself or from the radiation they had absorbed over the course of many years.
When I tried to ask my companions questions about the statues I saw, they both shrugged their shoulders and pointed to the trees a short distance away. I found out later that it wasn't that they did not understand my Japanese-- they said they just couldn't hear me. Shortly after we entered the holy grounds, the sounds of the cicadas crying increased in volume, and continued to grow in intensity until nothing could be heard but their sound. When I tried to shout over the noise, it was useless-- I couldn't even hear myself. After more gesticulation, we left the graveyard for the tennis court, which was much quieter. It was there that I was able to ask my questions and get answers. At that time, I found the answer to part of the puzzle about Basho's haiku-- yes, these cicada in Japan could cry loud enough to penetrate the stones.
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