(cricket sounds)

I love to hear the crickets sing.

You horrid little telltale!

That's enough!

A caged cricket eats just as much as a free cricket.

No cockroach could ever be allowed to set spiky foot in there.

On a branch floating downriver, a cricket singing.

Even as you see that though, some part of you recognizes in the image a small portrait of what it's like to live in this world of change and time, our human fate is to vanish, as surely as that small cricket will, and still, we do what it does.

The ones that terrorize the Japanese are big several centimetres long, and, unlike a house fly, a moth or a jumping spider, cannot be ignored. They must be dealt with if you ever want to sleep soundly again.