In Y. Kawabata's "The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket" the narrator witnesses a touching moment between a girl and a boy within a group of children searching for insects in a park with homemade lanterns.
As the narrator, a university student, approaches the scene, he sees the boy hand the girl an insect he has found, telling her it is a grasshopper. The girl accepts it, only to realize that it is a bell cricket, a much more rare and valued insect.
Then, as the two children are standing next to each other, the light from their lanterns flashes upon both of them, reflecting their names (carved into their homemade lanterns) on each other's shirts.
The narrator is the only one who sees this small moment of lights and names. In the end, he gives silent advice to the children and reader, that often in life we mistake a grasshopper for a bell cricket and then in our bitterness mistake a bell cricket for a grasshopper.
There is a melancholy in the narrator's tone as his speech obviously derives from missed opportunities and past experience, perhaps envious of the sign the two children were provided that multicolored night.
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