Kappa: Ryunosuke Akutagawa

A lone mountain hiker falls through a hole in the ground into Kappaland, inhabited by creatures that are half tiger, half turtle. Here, children choose whether to be born, unemployed workers are turned into sandwich meat, and human artists are enshrined as saints.
Despite the Kappas’ strange and often gruesome ways, it’s a return to the world above that drives the narrator to madness in Akutagawa’s only novel. Written as Japan entered an era of aggressive imperialism, this surreal satire is a darkly comic cry of protest.
Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Geoffrey Bownas.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) was one of Japan’s leading literary figures in the Taisho period. Regarded as the father of the Japanese short story, he produced over 150 in his short lifetime. Haunted by the fear that he would inherit his mother’s madness, Akutagawa suffered from worsening mental health problems towards the end of his life and committed suicide aged 35 by taking an overdose of barbiturates. Pushkin Press also publish a collection of his short stories, Murder in the Age of Enlightenment.

Geoffrey Bownas (1923-2011) was born in West Yorkshire. He learned Japanese while serving in the army during the Second World War, and went on to establish Oxford’s department of Japanese studies. He taught, translated and worked to further British-Japanese cultural understanding and international collaboration throughout his life, earning a CBE and Japan’s Order of the Sacred Treasure.