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Updated: May 29, 2025
After all, I do not positively detest this little Chrysanthème, and when there is no repugnance on either side, habit turns into a make-shift of attachment. Always, over, in, and through everything, rises day and night from this Japanese landscape the song of the cicalas, ceaseless, strident, and prodigious.
And who knows, perchance I may yet think of you sometimes when I recall this glorious summer, these pretty, quaint gardens, and the ceaseless concert of the cicalas.
In the valley resounded the ceaseless whirr of the cicalas, answering one another from shore to shore; the mountains reechoed with innumerable sounds; the whole country seemed to vibrate like crystal.
Others sing in sharp high voices hopping about continually, like cicalas in delirium.
"What's good enough for Rome," they said, "is surely good enough for Siluria," and, shivering, showed the latest official visitor a landscape that might have been transported bodily from the Sabine Hills ... if only there were more sun! "But we do miss the lizards and the cicalas," they would say with a sigh.
The house is just as I had fancied it should be in the many dreams of Japan I had made before my arrival, during my long night watches: perched on high, in a peaceful suburb, in the midst of green gardens; made up of paper panels, and taken to pieces according to one's fancy, like a child's toy. Whole families of cicalas chirp day and night under our old resounding roof.
And the whirr of the cicalas which, in Japan, is one of the continuous noises of life, and which in a few days we shall no longer even be aware of, so completely is it the background and foundation of all other terrestrial sounds was sonorous, incessant, softly monotonous, like the murmur of a waterfall.
In the penciled delineation of the woodwork, the minute delicacy with which it is wrought is wanting; neither have I been able to render the extreme antiquity, the perfect cleanliness, nor the vibrating song of the cicalas that seems to have been stored away within it, in its parched-up fibers, during some hundreds of summers.
Yves treats my wife as if she were a plaything, and continually assures me that she is charming. I find her as exasperating as the cicalas on my roof; and when I am alone at home, side by side with this little creature twanging the strings of her long-necked guitar, facing this marvellous panorama of pagodas and mountains, I am overcome by sadness almost to tears. July 13th.
In the vast flood of midday sunshine, to the quivering noise of the cicalas, I mount to Diou- djen-dji. The paths are solitary, the plants are drooping in the heat. Here, however, is Madame Jonquille, taking the air in the bright, grasshoppers' sunshine, sheltering her dainty figure and her charming face under an enormous paper parasol, a huge circle, closely ribbed and fantastically striped.
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