Late August. Tonight, try opening your window a little.
Riin, riin. Chin-chiro-rin. Jii, jii. The days are still hot, but after dark the sound has changed. The cicadas are handing over to the autumn insects.
In Japan, people used to go out specifically to listen to this. It was called mushi-kiki — “insect listening” — a seasonal pleasure of late summer and early autumn. In the Edo period, people packed a meal and walked out to the fields at night. Not to catch anything. To listen.
What this article covers
- Mushi-kiki was an outing made purely to hear the songs of autumn insects
- The practice can be traced back at least to the 8th century, in the Man’yōshū
- Heian aristocrats had games called “insect choosing” and “letting them loose”
- In the Edo period it became a popular pastime — and created a job: the insect seller
- An honest note: this is not a Japan-only culture. China has it too, and it is old there
- Insect song is still officially listed among the sounds Japan wants to keep
- How to do mushi-kiki tonight, with no equipment at all
What mushi-kiki is — going out in order to hear
Mushi-kiki means heading into the fields or up a hill to listen to singing insects: suzumushi (bell cricket), matsumushi (pine cricket), crickets, kutsuwamushi (giant katydid).
If cherry blossom viewing is an outing to see, mushi-kiki is an outing to hear. You walk in the cool of the evening, and you listen to what comes out of the grass. That is the entire activity.
“Insect” here doesn’t mean insects in general. As the entomologist Kenji Umetani explains, just as saying “flower” in Japan once meant cherry blossom, saying “insect” once meant specifically the autumn singers — the cricket family (bell cricket, pine cricket, enma cricket, bell-ringer cricket) and the katydid family. Most reach adulthood in late summer, and it is the males who sing, calling to females. What people were listening to, politely, was somebody else’s love song.
The oldest trace: the 8th century
Nobody knows when this began. But the Man’yōshū, Japan’s oldest surviving poetry anthology (late 8th century), contains seven poems about kōrogi — crickets. So the practice reaches back at least to the Nara period.
One caveat: at that time kōrogi appears to have been used as a general word for singing insects, not for one species. Before anyone sorted them by name, they were loved as a single category: the things that sing.
The Heian period: choose them, then release them
By the Heian period, keeping singing insects in cages to enjoy their voices had become fashionable among the aristocracy — and it produced some remarkably elaborate games:
- Mushi-erabi (“insect choosing”) — going out to fields such as Sagano and catching bell crickets and pine crickets to present to the imperial court
- No-banachi (“letting them loose”) — releasing the captured insects into your own garden, to hear them there
- Mushi-kiki (“insect listening”) — going out to the fields and simply listening
Catch them, release them, listen. It sounds like a lot of trouble — but releasing insects into a garden is a striking idea: landscaping for sound.
Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book lists four insects as pleasing: suzumushi, matsumushi, kirigirisu, and hataori. Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji has a chapter titled “Suzumushi,” in which pine crickets are caught and released into a garden, and a party is held to the sound of bell crickets.
Now for a complication. Since the Edo period, scholars have argued that the names “suzumushi” and “matsumushi” in the classics are swapped relative to modern usage, and this became the accepted view. But Umetani notes that some entomologists still maintain no such reversal occurred — the question is unsettled. Likewise, the kirigirisu of The Pillow Book is understood to mean today’s crickets, and hataori today’s katydid. We cannot be fully certain which voice a thousand-year-old writer was praising. That is how slippery the bond between a name and a sound can be.
The Edo period: a night out for everyone
In the Edo period, insect listening became a popular pleasure rather than a courtly one.
The most famous spot was Dōkanyama — around present-day Nishi-Nippori in Arakawa Ward, Tokyo. The great illustrated guidebook Edo Meisho Zue (compiled by Saitō Gesshin, published 1834 and 1836) features it as “Dōkanyama Mushi-kiki,” and Utagawa Hiroshige made a print of it. A woodblock series from 1864, Thirty-six Amusements of Edo, includes “Insect Listening at Dōkanyama” as well.
Being painted repeatedly means it was one of the images that said “this is Edo.” Asukayama, better known for its cherry trees, is said to have served as an insect-listening spot in autumn too.
And by the mid-Edo period, a trade had appeared: the mushi-uri, the insect seller. Their signature was a checkered-pattern stall lined with insect cages. Breeding techniques for bell crickets grew remarkably sophisticated — including warming overwintering eggs to bring stock to market early. The cages themselves ranged from simple bamboo work to lacquered, gold-decorated pieces made for daimyo households.
A craft and an occupation, both built to deliver a sound. One small noise, running an economy.
An honest note: this is not a Japan-only thing
You will sometimes read that only Japanese people appreciate insect song. That isn’t accurate.
According to Umetani, in China, women of the imperial court were keeping singing insects to enjoy their voices at least as early as the Tang dynasty (8th–9th centuries). The culture exists in both countries, and it is old in both.
The differences are in how each one grew. Japanese cages are mostly bamboo; Chinese containers are often gourds or closed wooden vessels. In China there is a habit of carrying a small insect in its container in a pocket and enjoying the song while walking — something Japan never took up. Conversely, dòuxī, the tradition of cricket fighting that goes back to the Song dynasty in the 12th century, never crossed to Japan at all.
Umetani’s conclusion is that the two cultures most likely arose separately and developed independently. Two places, far apart, falling for the same sound on their own. That is a far better story than exclusivity.
Turning sound into letters
If one thing does stand out about Japanese insect listening, it may be the habit of writing the voices down as syllables.
The school song Mushi no Koe (“The Voices of Insects”), first published in a Ministry of Education songbook in 1910, opens with “there, a pine cricket is singing” and then transcribes each one: the pine cricket as chin-chiro-rin, the bell cricket as rin-rin, the katydid as gacha-gacha, the umaoi as suitchon. The lyricist and composer were never made public.
Because the song is still taught in elementary school, most people raised in Japan know these insects as shapes of sound. You may never have seen a pine cricket, but you know that chin-chiro-rin is one. Writing the sound down passed on the listening itself.
Still on the list of sounds worth keeping
In 1996 Japan’s Environment Agency selected the 100 Soundscapes of Japan — sounds nominated by communities around the country as worth preserving for the future.
Three of the hundred are insect voices: the bell crickets of Miyagino (Sendai), the insect voices of Oshikiri on the Arakawa River (Kumagaya, Saitama), and the hour bell and insect song of Hikone Castle (Shiga).
The phrase “worth keeping” carries an admission inside it: that something is slipping away. The insect sellers faded after the postwar boom years. But there are still places where people raised their hands and said, this sound, we would like to keep.
How to touch it tonight
Mushi-kiki requires no equipment and no ticket.
Tonight, turn the air conditioning off for a moment and open a window. A few minutes is enough. Don’t do anything else. Just listen.
It does not matter at all if you can’t name what you hear. A thousand years ago they lumped them all together as “crickets” too. Simply noticing that high voices and low voices are layered, and that a singer stops and starts again — that already is mushi-kiki.
If you can get outside, walk a street with few streetlights. The people of Edo carried a meal out to the night fields, presumably, because it felt good.
In closing
Insects are not singing at you. It is not a sound made for human ears; it is an insect getting on with insect business.
And people decided it was beautiful anyway, gave it names, put it into songs, and stacked up a thousand years of words about it. Mushi-kiki, in the end, is the habit of listening carefully to something that was never addressed to you.
Late August. The sound is changing over. Open a window tonight.
