Welcome to Kappaland!
Kappa by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Translated by Geoffrey Bownas. London & Chicago: Peter Owen, 2016. 141 pages.
What is a kappa, you ask? A kappa is an amphibious water sprite from Japanese folklore. Humanoid in form, with a head, two arms, and two legs. Otherwise, it resembles a tortoise, with a shell on its back and a beak for a mouth. The creatures have a concave indentation, which forms a shallow bowl or “dish”, on the top of their heads. This indentation is initially soft in young kappas but hardens with age, and must be filled with water for the creature to move around freely on dry land. If the water spills out or dries up the kappa will become disoriented and vulnerable.
Other quirks are revealed in the literature – kappas can slide their arms through their torso from one side to the other, love cucumbers, and many of the tales surrounding them involve flatulence and farting. Kappas are frequently portrayed as harmless troublemakers who enjoy playing tricks on humans and livestock. But they are fickle beings, just as likely to have malevolent intentions. There are tales of them raping, drowning, and even eating unsuspecting bathers.
The writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa was, reportedly, fascinated by kappas. He made drawings of and wrote an entire novella about them. Kappa was published in 1927 – the same year Akutagawa committed suicide at age 35. It is a strange book, even for a writer who specialized in the weird and grotesque. Critics did not know what to make of it. Some thought it a children’s story. Others saw it as a social satire. One scholar argued it was simply a reflection of the author’s view of the world, his distaste for his fellow man. They were all probably right to some extent. Kappa does read a bit like a fable, in part because of the length, but also because of its fantastical elements. The characters/creatures who appear on its pages behave and are described in such a way as to appear to be modeled after real-life people, or at the very least recognizable stereotypes. And Akutagawa did take his own life, like one of the kappas in his story, because he was afraid he had inherited his mother’s mental illness. She suffered from schizophrenia.
But Akutagawa was also a contemporary of H.P. Lovecraft. And while the xenophobic New York writer probably never heard of him, whether or not the reverse was true remains unknown. We do know both men admired and were influenced by Edgar Allen Poe. Akutagawa, who taught Western literature, gave lectures on Poe’s writings. It’s not inconceivable that these two men developed and employed the same stylistic devices and explored similar subject matter despite the 6,742 miles between them. And, if true, wouldn’t that be wonderful?
Kappa opens with a familiar framing device: an Author’s Preface in which Akutagawa explains how he came to hear about the kappas and their home, Kappaland, from Patient Number 23, an inmate in a mental asylum. Patient Number 23 tells the story of how he encountered a kappa while hiking along the River Azusa, on his way to climb Mount Hodaku. The creature ran and he gave chase (for reasons that are never satisfactorily explained), ultimately following it into a clump of tall bamboo grass. The grass hid a hole into which he tumbled like Alice down the rabbit hole. He loses consciousness and when he awakens finds himself in Kappaland.
Fortunately, Kappaland is a civilization of benevolent kappa, not the nasty kind who want to rape and eat him. We are told he is not even their first human visitor. They welcome him and Patient Number 23 is surprised to discover that the citizens of this underground country are remarkably educated and cultured. The kappa he had been chasing is a simple fisherman, named Bag, who befriends him. As do several other kappas – among them a doctor, a politician, a businessman, a composer, a poet, and a student who acts as his guide. 23 learns about different aspects of kappa life and engages in philosophical debates comparing human society to kappa society. Our narrator even play the role of an anthropologist for our benefit. It is all very civilized, his findings recounted in the mannered tone of early 20th-century writing, reminiscent of a European colonizer’s observations on the “native population”. (This makes sense in the context of the period. In the 1920s, Japan was deep into the process of building its own colonial empire in places like Korea, Taiwan, and China).
In fact, the processes of the Kappa art of love-making are very different from ours. A she-Kappa sets eyes on a he-Kappa and thinks to herself, Yes – he is the one. And from that moment on, she’ll go to any lengths to make him hers, using every trick of the trade in the process. The most artless and forthright method is for the she-Kappa simply to make a mad dash for the luckless male of her choice. I’ve actually seen a pursuit of this sort – with a she-Kappa, looking quite out of her mind, dashing pell-mell after the male.
23 comes to admire his hosts, even to develop a certain affection for them. While at the same time recognizing that they are amoral beings. Very like, though predating, Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark. There are even references to “super-kappa”.1 In one passage 23 is told that workers who are laid off from his capitalist kappa friend’s factory (remember Japan, like most of the world, was entering the Great Depression) are ‘eaten up’. Asking what that means, he is told that ‘we slaughter any worker who loses his job, and we use his flesh as meat. Look, there’s a newspaper… “This month’s figure for newly-unemployed reached 64,579; the price of meat has fallen in proportion”.’ When 23 expresses his disgust and horror, his kappa friends laugh at him and accuse him of hypocrisy. They cite how in Japan “the daughters of the fourth class are sold into prostitution” and that it is “sheer sentimentality… to get hot under the collar about something as trifling as eating workmen’s flesh as meat!”
The above may sound strange, a bit dry, not to mention sexist and gross, but the world Akutagawa describes to us is very much alive. He is an undeniably talented writer, whose short stories and novellas display the innocent theatricality of early black and white films. The environments he creates are tangible. The characters he introduces are broadly drawn, but they are also three-dimensionally solid. Kappa holds up as a work of speculative fiction because of its author’s skill. The precision of Akutagawa’s prose and attention to detail speaks to a sense of craftsmanship that surprisingly few writers can claim to possess.
Akutagawa’s stories are widely available in translation, and I recommend looking them up. Most are historical – Kappa is the rarity set in a contemporary (to the author) space. Rashomon, his best-known work, is about a thief who discovers an old woman stealing the hair from a corpse. She justifies her actions by explaining that she steals the hair to make into the wigs she sells to buy food, and that the dead woman whose hair she is taking had stolen from others while alive. The ending is as unexpected as it is cynical. Rashomon is, like most of the author’s work, a very short story. And yet Akutagawa still manages to place us inside that room, atop a gate tower, surrounded by dead bodies with only a flickering candle for light. The air around us is humid from the rain outside. In the same way, using the same tricks, Akutagawa transports us to Kappaland. And as artificial as the world of the kappas is, all of the details it is fashioned from are plausible and familiar. And so we, for a little while, believe in it. It is Akutagawa who ultimately breaks the spell.
Because of their length and weirdness, it is too easy and obvious to dismiss Akutagawa’s stories as slight works, trivial magazine pieces on which the author squandered his talent. But he was taken seriously by revered writers like Soseki and Junichiro Tanizaki based on these same stories. They are important because of the time and place in which they were written, as well as for their technical mastery. And they deserve to be considered alongside books by Western writers like George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984.
In the Grove, another famous Akutagawa story which was the basis for the plot of the classic 1950 Akira Kurosawa film version of Rashomon, is structured as a series of first-person narratives. A body is found in a grove, and each chapter is a testimony/witness statement taken by someone (we assume the police) investigating the cause of death. The testimonies conflict, some are outright lies, and still with each one we come a little closer to piecing together what happened. The final statement is given by the dead man through a medium. In the Grove reminds us how important the framing of a story can be. In the same way Lovecraft breathes life into his Cthulhu mythology by allowing us to experience it through the eyes of a narrator who shares our incredulity and horror at what we are reading, Akutagawa convinces readers that Kappaland, this strange country populated by grotesque tortoise-people, exists. It’s a neat trick, probably as old as storytelling itself, but not an easy one to pull off. But when it works, it’s absolute magic on the page.
Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead was published in 1943. Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which he expounds on the Übermensch, was published in Germany in 1883. It was translated into Japanese c.1909 by Ikuta Choka, with the assistance of Akutagawa’s friend and teacher, Soseki.