The Cricket's Cage

Ted McGee is an associate professor of English at St. Jerome’s
College, University of Waterloo.

A singing cricket spends what may be the carpenter’s last night alive
using his antennae to draw a model of a new cage—one with “many
levels so [he] can have more space, and many pillars and crossbars so
[he] can crawl about more freely.” This cricket brings good luck
indeed; he saves several lives by producing a design not only for his
own cage, but also for the watchtowers at each corner of the wall
surrounding the Forbidden City in Beijing. Trust a lowly cricket to
capture what no human could: an architectural expression of imperial
power, elegance, splendor, and magnificence.

The Cricket’s Cage provides a glimpse of Chinese culture both through
the folktale that it tells and through the artistry of its pictures. As
an illustrator, Stefan Czernecki employs a formal but spare style
derived from Chinese painting. His deep colors come from Chinese mineral
and vegetable pigments, and the typeface used is Hiroshige Book. All of
the illustrations have wide yellow borders decorated with embroidery
work, the pattern and the color of which represent the robes of Yongle,
an emperor of the Ming dynasty.

The story itself, open as it is to a variety of interpretations, has
the strength of a traditional folktale. Recommended.