Kappa [Paperback]

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.Akutagawas magical final work is a short novel with a magic spell all its ownpoignant, fantastical, wry, melancholic, and witty One never tires of reading and re-reading his best works& The flow of his language is the best feature of Akutagawas style. Never stagnant, it moves along like a living thing. Enchanting and sometimes terrifyinga 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 Swifts 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. Kappa is a scathing satire of contemporary Japan&a welcome reintroduction to an important and often-overlooked classic by one of Japans most important modern writers as it approaches the 100th anniversary of its publication. Powell and Hofmann-Kuroda offer a crisp translation of this strange, densely literary 1927 fantasy novella from Akutagawa (18921927)...this is a thought-provoking way to spend an afternoon.