Kappa
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- 7,49 €
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- 7,49 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
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…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.