Insectopedia
Page 35
In “My First Excursion to West Mountain,” one of the eight short essays he completed between 809 and 812 that are “considered to have inaugurated the genre of the lyric travel account,” Liu wrote:
I have been in a state of constant fear since being exiled to this prefecture. Whenever I had a free moment, I would roam about, wandering aimlessly. Every day I hiked in the mountains accompanied by friends with similar fates. We would penetrate into the deep forests, following the winding streams back to their source, discovering hidden springs and fantastic rocks—no spot seemed too remote. Upon reaching a place, we would sit down on the grass, downing bottles of wine until we were thoroughly drunk. Drunk, we would lean against each other as pillows and fall asleep. Asleep, we would dream.23
Liu died in 819 at the age of forty-six. More than 500 years later he would be recognized as one the eight masters of Tang and Song dynasty prose.
The year he died, in A Record of Fu Ban, he described how, when an owl-fly larva catches its prey, it carries it “forward with its chin up.”
Its load is getting heavier and heavier. Though very tired, [the larva] does not fall down as it cannot rise to its feet once it has stumbled. Some people take pity on it and lift off the load so the insect can continue walking forward. However, it soon takes on its burden once again.24
* * *
Elsewhere during these years of exile, in a meditation on the nature of heaven and human responsibility, Liu Zongyuan asks: “Were someone to succeed in exterminating the insects that eat holes in things, could these things pay him back? Were someone to aid harmful creatures in breeding and proliferating, could these things resent him?”
No, of course not, he says. The fact of the matter is that “merit is self-attained and disaster is self-inflicted.” He is near the end of his time in this melancholy place. “Those who expect rewards or punishments are making a big mistake.… You should just believe in your [principles of] humanity and righteousness, wander in the world according to these principles, and live [in this way] until your death.”25
Extermination
After the defeat of the Nazis, Karl von Frisch returned to Munich to resume his work as director of the Institute of Zoology. In 1947, he published Ten Little Housemates, a small book for nonscientific readers in which he tried to show that “there is something wonderful about even the most detested and despised of creatures.”26
* * *
He begins with the housefly (“a trim little creature”) and moves on to mosquitoes (which, he admits, “can never be pleasant”), fleas (“An adult man wanting to compete with a flea would have to clear the high-jump bar at about 100 metres and his long-jump would have to measure about 300 metres.… At one jump he could leap from Westminster Bridge to the top of Big Ben”), bed bugs (“We must remember that all living creatures are equal in the eyes of the great law of life: men are not superior to mice nor bugs to men”), lice (“With its forefeet alone a louse can carry up to two thousand times the weight of its body for a whole minute. This is more than the strongest athlete could ever hope to do; it would mean holding up a weight of 150 tons in his hands!”), the cockroach (“a community that has come down in the world”), silverfish (“Lepisma saccharina—the sugar guest.… They are entirely harmless housemates”), spiders (“It is astonishing how little the inborn [web-making] skill of these animals is bound to a rigid system, how greatly their actions differ in detail according to local conditions and according to the weaver’s character”), and ticks (“As there is good reason for the female’s bloodthirstiness, we cannot blame her. Anyone who has to hatch out a few thousand eggs can do with a good meal”).
* * *
Von Frisch devotes one of his longer chapters to his tenth housemate, the clothes moth. He begins with the caterpillar. Like the dung beetle, it turns out to be an essential scavenger, feeding off the planet’s suffocating mountains of surplus hair, feathers, and fur. Like the caddis fly larva, it fashions itself a protective case, spinning a tiny silken tube, a minute padded sock, which it covers with trimmings from the keratin-based world around it. To eat, it peeks its head out of the tube and nibbles the landscape beside the opening. When everything within reach is gone, it explores by extending its case further into the underbrush.
Soon the caterpillar is fully grown and leaves its tube. Awkwardly, it makes its way to a new location, from which the moth will easily be able to take to the air. Maybe it’s the surface of your grandmother’s fur coat or perhaps your favorite winter sweater. Once it arrives, the caterpillar spins itself a new home, gussies it up as before, and prepares for pupation.
* * *
Like many lepidoptera, the adult clothes moth cannot eat or drink. In its few weeks of life, it exhausts the energy stores it accumulated as a caterpillar, losing 50 to 75 percent of its body weight in the process. The female, heavy with up to 100 eggs, is reluctant to fly and spends her days hiding in the dark. Von Frisch is irritated by uninformed violence. “When a lively moth flies around the room,” he says, “there is no point in the whole family chasing it. It is only a male. There are plenty of male moths, actually about double the number of females. So the birthrate will not be affected if a few more or less are killed.”27
* * *
Von Frisch’s little housemates are extraordinary and, in their own ways, exceptional. He explores the extremes of their existence, explains their extravagances, examines their exuberances, and excluding exaggeration, exalts in their extravagations. With his characteristic exactitude, he examines his own experiments and expands on his experiences. In extensive and exhaustive excurses—often external to the exegesis—he extends excuses and extenuations for their excesses. Still, each of his chapters ends with recommendations for his little housemates’ extirpation, that is, for their extermination.
Houseflies should be trapped on flypaper or poisoned. Clothes moths are susceptible to naphthalene and camphor. Silverfish can be controlled with DDT (which “does not harm human beings or domestic animals if it is used in reasonable quantities and according to the instructions”). Lice should be mass-killed by fumigation with prussic acid and its derivatives (“one useful product of the war”). Mosquitoes require more drastic measures: you should drain their wetland habitats, flood the area with petroleum, or introduce predatory fish into their breeding pools. DDT should also be used against cockroaches.
“It is doubtful whether insects feel pain at all as we do,” says von Frisch. And he tells a story to demonstrate his claim. He goes back to his beloved bees, the little comrades to whom he devoted his adult life. “If you take a pair of sharp scissors,” he begins, “and cut a bee in two, taking care not to disturb it while it is taking a drop of sugary water, it will go on eating.”28
Von Frisch’s even, good-natured tone doesn’t change. Roger Caillois encountered something like this too, something that brought death, pleasure, and pain into one claustrophobic space. But Caillois, conscripted by a different type of science, found himself bound and subject to his animal: “I am deliberately expressing myself in a roundabout way,” he wrote as he tried to explain the peculiar power of the praying mantis, “as it is so difficult, I think, both for language to express and for the mind to grasp that the mantis, when dead, should be capable of simulating death.”29
But the bee just keeps on drinking. It doesn’t seem to raise questions beyond the experiment. It appears to have lost its magic. Its “pleasure—if it feels any—is even considerably prolonged,” von Frisch observes. “It cannot drink its fill, for what it sucks trickles out again at the rear, and hence it can feast on the sweetness for a long time before it finally sinks dead of exhaustion.”30 Ex-animal, ex animo. He extends, exhibits, and exanimates. It excretes, exhales, and expires.
But let’s not forget: just as there are forms of the marvelous that thrive on knowledge, there is knowledge that despite itself adds to the marvelous; just as there are those who underestimate the lowly multitude, there are people who understand only too well its many-
sided power; just as there are those who subject the animal to the steel of experiment, there are those who take pity and lift off its load, even though it soon takes on its burden once again.
Yearnings
1.
Kawasaki Mitsuya sells live beetles on the Internet. My friend Shiho Satsuka found his site and, knowing it would get my attention, sent me the link. A few weeks later, I was in the suburbs of Wakayama City, outside Osaka, with my friend CJ Suzuki, sitting in Kawasaki’s insect-filled living room and talking about ookuwagata, the Japanese stag beetles in which he trades.
Kawasaki Mitsuya recently gave up his job as a hospital radiographer, but there’s no money in stag beetles, he tells us. He opens some jars and explains that he does this for love. He fills his website with his poems. Some are silly, some are cute, some are abruptly bitter, even angry. Most are melancholy laments that contrast middle-aged male disillusion with the innocent openness of youth. (“He looks at the sky and the blue stays in his eyes. / The eyes of a child are like glass balls that truthfully reflect the world. / The eyes of the grown man have lost their light, / His eyes are cloudy like stagnant pools.”)1
Kawasaki tells us that his mission is to heal the family. He wants to open the hearts of men and bring them closer to their sons. Fathers have become cold; their hearts are hard and dry. Their lives are deadening. They have no interest in their children. They don’t feel the connection. On his website, he offers to lend stag beetles at no charge. Perhaps insect friends will bring families together. He remembers the love he felt when he was a boy hunting beetles in the mountains around Wakayama. “I want to nourish their hearts,” he says.
Online, Kawasaki Mitsuya calls himself Kuwachan, a sweet name that a parent might give a child who is fond of insects: kuwa from kuwagata, or stag beetle, and -chan a common diminutive suffix. Across the top of his home page is a brightly colored cartoon of a small boy in full insect-collecting kit. It is Kuwachan as he remembers himself in the 1970s, white hat, hiking boots, water canteen and collecting box slung around his neck, a butterfly net grasped like a flag in the breeze, its pole thrust into the earth. Kuwachan the insect-boy, high on a hill, back to the viewer, face upturned to the blue of the sky, arms thrown wide to the world and its possibilities.
A few days earlier, CJ and I had spent the day in Hakone, a popular spa town in the hills southwest of Tokyo. We were visiting Yoro Takeshi, neuroanatomist, best-selling social commentator, and insect collector. Like Kuwachan, Yoro welcomed us into his home and filled the day with wide-ranging conversation. Yoro is in his late sixties, but he pursues his insects with youthful energy, augmenting his enormous collection with expeditions to Bhutan, chasing weevils as well as the more extravagant elephant beetles. When CJ and I arrived at his house, he was examining a set of burnt-orange penises from type specimens on loan from the Natural History Museum in London, using his state-of-the-art microscopes and monitors to reveal species-defining morphological differences that made me wonder about human limitations that had never previously crossed my mind.
Like Kuwachan, Yoro has loved insects since he was a child. Like Kuwachan, he told us that they affected him profoundly. After collecting for so many years, he now has “mushi eyes,” bug eyes, and sees everything in nature from an insect’s point of view. Each tree is its own world, each leaf is different. Insects taught him that general nouns like insects, trees, leaves, and especially nature destroy our sensitivity to detail. They make us conceptually as well as physically violent. “Oh, an insect,” we say, seeing only the category, not the being itself.
Shortly after returning to Tokyo, CJ and I came across this photograph, evidence that Yoro, like Kuwachan, was once an insect-boy, a konchu-shonen. There he is on the right, resolutely setting off into the hills of Kamakura soon after the Second World War, a time of devastation and hunger, but a time nonetheless of adolescent exploration and freedom.
We met Yoro at his newly built weekend home, a quirky barnlike construction designed by the “Surrealist architect” Fujimori Terunobu that—with its strip of meadow sprouting from the apex of the roof—suggests both Anne of Green Gables and The Jetsons. The house reminded us of those out-of-joint structures that populate Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and other epic animations by Hayao Miyazaki, structures that fill an elaborate universe that is somewhere and some when unknown but still somehow instantly familiar.
The connections were not accidental. It emerged that not only are Yoro Takeshi and Hayao Miyazaki close friends but that Miyazaki, too, cultivates a passion for insects that began with a childhood as a konchu-shonen. What’s more, it seems Miyazaki also enjoys collaborating with avant-garde architects. He and the artist-architect Arakawa Shusaku have drawn up plans for a utopian town whose houses are not unlike the one in Hakone to which Yoro gets away from the city and in which he keeps his insects. Theirs is a distinctly hippie vision of social engineering, motivated by some of the same worries about alienation and some of the same yearnings for community that preoccupy Kuwachan. Theirs is a town where children can escape what all of these men see as the profound estrangement of Japan’s media-saturated society and where they can rediscover a golden childhood of play, experimentation, and exploration in nature, where children—and adults too—can learn (again) to see, feel, and develop their senses.2
Kawasaki, Yoro, and Miyazaki were only the first of many insect boys that CJ and I encountered in Japan. It seemed that wherever we went, we met konchu-shonen, both large and small. We came across a famous one in Takarazuka, the home of the celebrated all-women theater company, with its long-lasting idols and mass following of devoted female fans. We couldn’t get tickets to a performance, but no matter. We were in town for another attraction, the Tezuka Osamu Manga Museum, a perfect small museum dedicated to the life and work of the acknowledged god of manga (and innovator in anime), who died in 1989.
If Miyazaki is the current superstar of anime, Tezuka was the artistic genius who used the narrative techniques of cinema to transform the printed page, creating a dizzyingly kinetic comic-book form that accommodates every conceivable subject matter and emotion. He, too, was a passionate insect collector, so passionate that he named his first company Mushi Productions, incorporated a cute version of the Sino-Japanese character for the word mushi into his signature, and populated his stories with butterfly-people, erotic moths, beetle robots, and endlessly varied metamorphoses and rebirths. Sure enough, there was Tezuka fully decked out as Insect Boy in the museum’s introductory video, ready for adventure, an early intimation of Astro Boy, the android superhero who is still one of Tezuka’s most marketable creations (and who, in the intricate, multiauthored ways of such creativity was, Tezuka recalled, inspired by Walt Disney’s Jiminy Cricket—a different kind of insect-human).
“This place was a space station, a secret jungle for explorers to discover,” Tezuka’s text reads; in the background melodic harpsichords and the chirps of birds and crickets. It was “an infinity where imagination could expand forever.” The sky is a dreamlike azure; the boys are in sepia. As the images floated by, CJ translated: “I was bullied as a child and thrust into war. I cannot say everything was great, and I don’t want to dwell in the past. But looking back now, I’m grateful to have been surrounded by so much nature. My experience of running freely in mountains, rivers, and meadows and of the insect collecting in which I was so absorbed gave me unforgettable memories and imbued in me a feeling of nostalgia as a deep part of my body and my heart.”
Tezuka won’t dwell in the past, but he won’t give up that longing either, the sweet-sad pleasure that feeds on the impossibility of erasing the distance between me then and me now. It’s an absence easy to reproduce: easy as an azure sky and two sepia boys. It’s an absence easy to fill, too, if not with a mail-order kuwagata then with an afternoon spent mushi hunting.
CJ and I shade our eyes as we step out of the insect museum in Minoo Park, the same park where Tezuka the konchu-shonen first collected insects with his sepia
friends. Here, all around us, under the bluest sky, are living families, here in the here and now, fathers and sons (and a few women and girls also, although they rarely show up in the memories or longings of konchu-shonen). Here they are in the bright afternoon sun, fully equipped konchu-shonen, spread out along the shallow river, searching for bugs—water striders, water boatmen, crabs, too—serious but happy, balanced on rocks, dipping toes into the cool water, splashing around, emptying nets, showing their grown-ups what they’ve found (not much, as it’s too early in the summer).
The children are collecting specimens for their school summer projects, and their fathers are there to help them, also in shorts and hats, also holding the nets and buckets, which they got for ¥2,000 (U.S.$20), a price that includes a lab session at which anything they find can be pinned, ID’d according to the full-color zukan (field guide), and turned into a specimen. It’s a sunny day of kazoku service, family service. A day to fulfill the promise of Kuwachan’s poems, a day for boys to use their nets to catch the memories for a lifetime and men to learn again how to be fathers as they relive what it felt like to be a son.
And speaking of fathers and sons, here is one more insect-boy. He’s standing with the inflatable rhinoceros beetle that his father just bought for him at the summer festival. They’re on their way home, late at night outside the Minowa metro station in northeast Tokyo, a boy and his father under the streetlights, stopping to chat with a stranger and pose for a photo.
That’s just camera shake during a long exposure. But it’s as if he’s hardly there. The little boy with his giant kabutomushi. He’s melting into the lights, already inaccessible, already an object of desire, longing, and regret.