Beetle Love

by Anna Kunnecke

The kabutomoshi are rioting.  They stalk their cages, rattle their bars, fetch high prices, and are cosseted and petted.  Since furry animals are banned from the great hives that house many of us Tokyo dwellers, every year a swarm of Japanese children tie their heartstrings to giant bugs.

Coming to Japan at age five, I was already too schooled in my fear of insects to be anything other than fascinated and repulsed.  But my little sister, who was born here, was friendly with the great armored beetles.  As a toddler, she would pluck them out of the flimsy green cage my brother kept them in and let them climb in her hair.  As they slipped and slid through her brown locks, they looked like toy action figures-- as militant and fearsome as superheroes. 

My daughter's preschool has its own boot camp.  In late spring the teachers set up enormous terrariums so that the kids can see the beetles hatch out of the dirt.  The exotic creatures begin, forgive me, as maggots.  Then they grow into loathsome enormous transparent grubs, and then they are great thick white nauseating larvae for weeks.  But the kids love it.  They adore their kabutomushi (rhinocerous beetle) and their kuwagata (stag beetle), pat the cage lovingly, and report each day on their progress.  Unbelievably, these blind wriggling digits eventually morph into shiny black warriors with great horned heads and powerful pincers. 

In an odd twist, as I was writing this piece, an enormous semi (cicada) skittered onto my balcony.  He lay on his back, stunned for a minute, and I contemplated him still being there when my daughter got home from school, knowing full well that she would want to adopt him and feed him her fruit jellies, and that she would mourn his death.  I wasn't thrilled with the prospect.  But then he recovered himself with a great flapping clatter.  At sixteen floors up, he was tragically out of his element and furious about it, and the noise was unbelievable.  He chittered and screeched his despair, banging around my potted geraniums, before finally taking off to find some decent digs. 

There is another kind of bug that you see in Tokyo.  Smaller than the kabutomushi and the semi, and infinitely more sinister: the cockroach.  But let's not speak of that. 

Beneath my revulsion, I am relieved.  My daughter is hearing a story about the things that repulse us, one I can't tell her myself. 

Turn over a leaf and see what is underneath.  Dig into the dirt to learn its secrets.  Find what lives pale and blind in the darkness, watch its shell harden dark and shiny, see it grow weapons.  Feed the fierce beast on plastic-cupped jellies from the local family restaurant.  Stroke its horns.