Review: A New Translation of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Kappa – Reuben Dendinger
August 19, 2024
In Japan, July 24th is known as Kappaki, after Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s famed novella Kappa. The 24th does not commemorate the date of the book’s publication but rather the day when, in 1927, the 35-year old Akutagawa shocked the Japanese literary world by committing suicide via an overdose of sleeping pills.
A master of the short story, Akutagawa composed beguiling fables with the elegant construction and dry humor of classical Zen poetry. Kappa—freshly translated by Allison Markin Powell and Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda for New Directions—was written very quickly in the final year of the author’s life while he was suffering from insomnia and hallucinations. The hasty, almost perfunctory quality of certain passages in Kappa is therefore perhaps unsurprising. Why should we expect meticulous craftsmanship in a book which is itself a chronicle of the author’s deteriorating sanity, and a treatise on the futility of literature itself?
In his final novel Suicide, Édouard Levé raises the question of the teleology of self- annihilation, the power of this dramatic act to retroactively transform one’s entire biography (and bibliography). After handing the manuscript of Suicide in to his editor, Levé hanged himself. As Levé himself suggests, it is inevitable that we would interpret the novel as a suicide note in grand style, the book imbued with the tragic fascination of its author’s decisive end. But should we allow such things to influence our literary judgment? Perhaps all novels should be imagined as confessions jotted down just before a botched suicide attempt, thus eliminating the unfair advantage enjoyed by writers who actually went through with it. As for novelists themselves, it wouldn’t hurt for them to consider each book their last. The way some writers carry on you’d think they’d never even considered dying, either on purpose or on accident.
Kappa is narrated by a psychiatric inmate known only as Patient No. 23, who recounts the story of his sojourn in the land of the kappa, a type of demon from Japanese folklore that resembles a humanoid turtle. Each chapter examines a different character or aspect of kappa society, which turns out to be a demented reflection of Taishō-era Japan, in which cannibalism, eugenics, and sundry other horrors and absurdities are part of daily life. Gory satire and slapstick lunacy only occasionally lapse into dry pseudo-anthropology.
At one point the narrator comes across a kappa standing in the middle of the street: “his feet were splayed wide, he was bent over, and he was peering between his legs at the steady stream of traffic and passersby.” Patient No. 23 pulls the kappa upright and demands to know what he’d been doing. The creature replies: “Well, since I’d been feeling so depressed, I thought I’d try looking at the world upside down. But turns out, it’s exactly the same.”
Even if our most outrageous fantasies merely reflect our own brutishness and stupidity, they are still preferable to real life. When Patient No. 23 returns to normal society, he finds human beings ugly and repulsive, and dreams of returning to kappa land. Absorbed in recounting these sardonic dreams, the narrator postpones his confrontation with his actual circumstances—his confinement to the mental asylum, his exile from humanity, the fate of madmen which Akutagawa himself sought to avoid by ending his life while his sanity still remained partially intact.
Kappa is a frame narrative, with the story taking the form of an elaborate nightmare narrated by a psychiatric patient, a delusion he has concocted to avoid facing an unexplained trauma. As a farewell letter to the world, Kappa offers among other things a pessimistic verdict on the art of fiction: nothing more than a hallucination, a temporary reprieve, and yet at its best, possessing a powerful supernatural attraction, capable of haunting us long after we’ve returned to the world of the living.