Welcome to Japan's rainy season, also known as the Insect Season. Although I live in an old Japanese house with generations of insects going back as far as the Heian Period, I also live with the comfort of knowing I'll never starve to death. "Getemono," the Japanese word for "gross things to eat," includes insects, cocoons, lizards, snakes, frogs, pigeons, etc. Not only will I never starve in my house, I surely have enough insects to open a getemonoya restaurant.
This doesn't make it any easier to live among insects though. So I finally decided that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. When I was at the home center the other day, where they sell everything for the home including crickets, I bought four crickets: Two males and two females. I call them Ned, Ted and the Girls. For 500 yen I got four "suzumushi" (bell crickets) and a plastic cage with some dirt and grass in it.
Before I came to Japan, I didn't know the sound Japanese bell crickets make. On my planet, the United States, the crickets I remember made a different sound. Suzumushi make a rin-rin trilling sound that starts low and ends high. It's like a whole new language, and one that I wouldn't have recognized before. Now, I can speak a little cricket but I can't get the melody part. Those octave languages are so difficult to learn!