Cicadas

Cicadas give Yuto an image through which to hold together a broken shell, a living voice, and the deaths his family cannot easily speak about. In a prize-winning haiku, he imagines the sound of a cicada singing after leaving its shell; Rié, reading his explanation, sees how literature has become a solace he found for himself. The poem never names her dead husband or son, but its silence carries the grief that Rié hears within it.

The poem and its origin

The cicadas enter the story through a haiku Yuto submitted as summer-break homework. The previous fall, it won the middle-school category of a newspaper’s all-Japan competition. Yuto kept the achievement to himself, and Rié learned of it only after the ceremony, when she noticed a large commemorative plaque in the corner of his room. The poem was beside it: “In his cast-off shell / How rich the singing echoes / Cicada voices”.

The judges’ response joined reservation to admiration. They criticized the poem for “affected ostentation,” yet praised Yuto’s “precocious talent.” Rié did not consider herself qualified to judge the work, and its success astonished her precisely because she had not known that her son was composing poetry. What she could recognize was the importance of the private practice behind it: although Yuto hardly spoke to his family, he had been steadily writing in a notebook. Rié had resisted looking inside, afraid that doing so would damage his trust. The poem reached her without requiring her to violate that boundary.

Shell, voice, and imagined listening

In the explanation printed with his acceptance speech, Yuto described seeing an abandoned cicada shell stuck to a cherry tree in Burial Mound Park. Many cicadas sang in the upper branches. He listened for the voice of the one that had flown from the shell, imagining how the shell might have heard the voice of the body that had lain underground for seven years. His attention moves between what remains and what has departed: the shell is empty, but the living sound seems to let its former occupant be imagined again.

A second observation turns that act of listening into the poem’s musical image. Yuto stared at the crack along the shell’s back; it reminded him of a violin’s soundboard. Once the shell appeared to him as a resonating instrument, the poem took shape. The image is neither a simple likeness between insect and instrument nor an explanation that closes off the mystery of absence. Instead, it joins the crack, the shell’s hollow form, and the surrounding chorus in an imagined resonance. The living cicadas do not literally restore the one that left its shell; they make its lost voice conceivable.

Grief held in what is left unsaid

Yuto’s explanation says nothing about the death of his brother or father. That omission matters to Rié, who understands that the cherry tree he mentions must be the one her husband had chosen for himself. She cannot tell whether Yuto really went alone to the park and experienced the scene as described or whether he invented it. The uncertainty remains unresolved; what she can picture is her son at the foot of the tree, looking at the shell and listening to the cicadas. The thought brings her to tears.

The poem’s connection to the family’s losses is therefore carried indirectly, through the shell, the voice, and the place, rather than through a declared statement of mourning. Rié does not claim that Yuto consciously wrote about his dead relatives, and the poem itself does not name them. Its force for her lies in the possibility that the scene gives form to an experience the boy does not explain to his family. The empty shell remains empty, but the image makes room for a voice to be heard in relation to what is gone.

Literature as Yuto’s own refuge

Rié had always placed readers on a pedestal, although neither she nor the men she married belonged to that type. Yuto’s love of reading consequently seemed to her something distinctive, not simply inherited from either parent. She believed its cause must lie in his milieu, yet found beauty in the thought that it had budded spontaneously from the wreckage of disaster. His poetry extends that sense of unexpected growth: amid family bereavement and his withdrawal from conversation, he has found a practice through which to observe, imagine, and give shape to experience.

Rié recognizes that literature brings Yuto solace, but she also recognizes the limits of her own role. She could not have recommended this particular way of coping, because she would never have thought of it herself. The poem does not make the family’s losses disappear or restore the dead; it shows Yuto discovering, independently, how attention and invention might let him live with them. For Rié, seeing that achievement matters more than deciding whether the judges were right to call his talent precocious.

The echo and Makoto Hara’s name

The cicada image also falls at a moment when Rié is trying to understand the man she knew as her husband. For the past year, he had gone without a name in her mind. Learning from Kido’s report that he was Makoto Hara felt like meeting him all over again, but receiving the proper name did not by itself overcome her estrangement. She had believed him two years older than she was; discovering that he was two years younger finally explained why she had felt compelled to use the diminutive suffix “kun.”

She cannot call him “Daisuké-kun” without feeling that the name belongs to someone else, yet she cannot immediately settle on “Makoto-kun” either. She has no way to hear him answer and confirm that the name is right. Only after Kido leaves, when she can look at her husband’s pictures on her computer for the first time in ages, does she feel certain he had yearned to be called by his real name and loved as Makoto, not as Daisuké. Against this struggle over naming, Yuto’s poem offers a related but distinct image: what has departed cannot simply be recovered, yet something of it may still be heard. The cicada’s echo does not supply a reply from the dead; it gives Rié a way to attend to the traces they leave behind.