Kappa

A Kappa is a mythical beast, found in Japanese folklore. But, in Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s 1927 novel, Kappa, a whole nation of Kappas (cute creatures) come alive, predominantly in the male gender (though the female of the species does exist), inhabiting their very own world called Kappaland, which is almost a parallel to ours.

Kappas have cities with roads, houses, shops and public buildings; they have factories, hospitals and schools; they have trees, rivers and seas; they have politics, religion and wars; they have doctors, judges, businessmen, students, poets, philosophers and fishermen; and they experience the same emotions of love, greed, jealousy, etc. as we do. However, some of their thinking and behaviour are different – almost opposite – from ours.

We know all this because Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s protagonist from his novel Kappa, identified simply as Patient No.23 in the Author’s Preface, is there to tell us his story of Kappas and Kappaland from personal experience.

Although Kappa is hailed as one of Akutagawa’s greatest achievements – his most famous work is his collection of short stories published as Roshomon, made even more famous by Japanese director Akira Kurasawa in his epic film of the same name, which was based on two stories from Akutagawa’s Roshomon collection – I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between Kappa and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as well as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, both of which were published much before Akutagawa’s novel.

For instance, Alice falls asleep in the garden and then wakes up to find a white rabbit, which she then chases down a rabbit hole, to arrive at Wonderland. Akutagawa’s Patient No.23 also falls asleep in a jungle by a river in the foothills of a mountain, wakes up to find a real life Kappa and chases it, only to fall down a hole in which the Kappa disappears, and finally arrives unconscious in Kappaland. Or, for instance, the references to, and description of, things in Kappaland which are similar to our human world (in this case Japan), and yet which are ‘upside-down’ or logically inverse of the human world. Alice’s Wonderland is built on a similar ‘upside-down’ or logically-inverse model.

But, perhaps, I’m being petty. After all, Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Kappa is a charming tale of a Japanese man’s accidental discovery of Kappas and his stay in Kappaland (for an undefined period) before returning to Japan. Akutagawa’s parallels between Japan and Kappaland, at times somewhat surreal, are indeed something to marvel at. The fact that Akutagawa wrote Kappa as a response to his revulsion of himself and of the Japanese society at that time (leading to his suicide at 35 years of age, soon after publishing his novel) – as it is explained in a very long Introduction to the novel by G H Healey – is, of course, unclear to the reader from the story. But, that doesn’t take away anything from the fun and enchantment of the Kappas in the novel.

[Citation: Kappa by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1927), translated from the Japanese by Geoffrey Bownas (1970), with an Introduction by G H Healey; Peter Owen Publishers, 2004.]