Kappa

by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (Translator), Allison Markin Powell (Translator)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Using fantastical elements to roast Japanese society in the early 20th century, this sharp satire may be 'of an era,' but just like Dante's Inferno or Voltaire, the evisceration of society is nonetheless impactful and meaningful.

Akutagawa’s magical final work is a short novel with a magic spell all its own—poignant, fantastical, wry, melancholic, and witty

The Kappa is a creature from Japanese folklore known for dragging unwary toddlers to their deaths in rivers: a scaly, child-sized creature, looking something like a frog, but with a sharp, pointed beak and an oval-shaped saucer on top of its head, which hardens with age.
Akutagawa’s Kappa is narrated by Patient No. 23, a madman in a lunatic asylum: he recounts how, while out hiking in Kamikochi, he spots a Kappa. He decides to chase it and, like Alice pursuing the White Rabbit, he tumbles down a hole, out of the human world and into the realm of the Kappas. There he is well looked after, in fact almost made a pet of: as a human, he is a novelty. He makes friends and spends his time learning about their world, exploring the seemingly ridiculous ways of the Kappa, but noting many—not always flattering—parallels to Japanese mores regarding morality, legal justice, economics, and sex. Alas, when the patient eventually returns to the human world, he becomes disgusted by humanity and, like Gulliver missing the Houyhnhnms, he begins to pine for his old friends the Kappas, rather as if he has been forced to take leave of Toad of Toad Hall…

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811232166
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/06/2023
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	107,944
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) wrote over a hundred short stories and was considered a major author when he committed suicide at the age of thirty-five (just after finishing Kappa): one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards is named after him. Two of the stories from his collection Rashomon formed the basis of the award-winning film of the same title by Akira Kurosawa.

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda is a literary translator. Born in Tokyo, raised in Texas, she currently resides in New York City.

Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator, editor, and publishing consultant. She maintains the database japaneseliteratureinenglish.com.

Editorial Reviews

03/13/2023

Powell and Hofmann-Kuroda offer a crisp translation of this strange, densely literary 1927 fantasy novella from Akutagawa (1892–1927), presented as the account of Psychiatric Patient No. 23. The patient tells an unknown author and a hospital director of his Alice in Wonderland–esque fall down a rabbit hole to Kappa Land, where Kappas—amphibious, thick-billed, webbed-hand and -footed three-foot-tall creatures from Japanese mythology—live in a city that looks “exactly like Ginza-dori, one of the main boulevards in Tokyo.” The new translation is modern, matter-of-fact, and readable, with a plot reminiscent of Edwin Abbot Abbot’s satire Flatland in its use of fantastical elements to skewer society, its very short chapters centered on different aspects of an invented culture, and its dated misogyny. There are no named female characters, and all the female Kappas are depicted as either jealous cheaters or knitting nonentities. It’s difficult to determine if this depiction of women should be read as sincere or as poking fun at the social views of the Taishō era. Still, for Japanophiles and SFF readers interested in investigating the canon of world literature, this is a thought-provoking way to spend an afternoon. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Enchanting and sometimes terrifying—a certain restrained sorrow, a certain preference for the visual, a certain lightness of touch, seem to me essentially Japanese. Extravagance and horror are in his work, but never in his style, which is always crystal clear. Perhaps he was inspired by Swift’s Yahoos [but] halfway through the story, Akutagawa forgets the satiric conventions: it hardly matters to him that the Kappa, who are water imps, turn into humans who talk about Marx, Darwin, or Nietzsche."

Jorge Luis Borges

"Kappa is a scathing satire of contemporary Japan…a welcome reintroduction to an important and often-overlooked classic by one of Japan’s most important modern writers as it approaches the 100th anniversary of its publication."

Asian Review of Books - Alison Fincher

"One never tires of reading and re-reading his best works… The flow of his language is the best feature of Akutagawa’s style. Never stagnant, it moves along like a living thing."

Haruki Murakami

08/01/2023

Psychiatric patient No. 23, "quite the youthful looking madman," relates his experiences in the curious realm of the mythological Kappa, in this unfussy new translation of Akutagawa's final novella, from 1927. As with the cultural turmoil of Taishō-era Japan, the Kappa find themselves in an eclectic roil of competing values and traditions, the old ways given over to a religion called Nowism, devoted to "eating, drinking, and copulating." As for politics, "every speech is a complete lie. But everyone knows that, so in the end, it might as well be the truth." Existential questions lurk beneath the antic topsy-turvydom of Kappaland, such as when Kappas are asked in the womb if they wish to be born (many do not). The Kappa poet Tok, who shoots himself while plagiarizing Goethe, then returns as a ghost preoccupied with posthumous fame, hinting at Akutagawa's own impending suicide. VERDICT Although often compared to Gulliver's Travels, the tale's playful illogic aligns Akutagawa's style with the more obscure fabulism of Gogol. A peculiar and plangent farewell from a seminal figure of Japanese modernism.

Library Journal