Sounds of Ghosts

I was just looking for something in the car this evening when I noticed how loud the cicadas were becoming in the dusk. They are so loud down here in leafy Chiba-ken eh? The sound of the Kanto countryside in late summer. They have been active for a few weeks already but the last two weeks of July and and early August is when they are at their best.

There is one particular species here that is so loud, and has such a crazy and 'mechanical' call, that in my first year in Japan I thought that it was something going wrong with our electricity supply.

Cicadas in the hot dull soupy evening gloom is surely one of the sounds of ghosts calling around here. The humidty dulls all distant noises, removes all sense of dimension and direction to the hearing. And then the strident sounds of cicadas fill all the airless dark space under the trees, moths gather around the occasional light in the lane. O-bon has come. Dead relatives will return now to see how we are getting on.

Interesting how every culture and place produces it's own spooky times and sounds like this. With us in Britain it's the dark nights and howling gales of October and November that invoke this sense of haunting. Here it's the airless darkness of summer nights.