A surreal masterpiece from one of Japan's greatest writers

In early 20th-century Japan, a lone hiker falls through a hole in the ground into Kappaland. This is a place ruled by amphibious creatures who share characteristics with tigers and turtles, but who, for all their strangeness, shed light on the human condition.

In Kappaland children choose whether or not to be born, intellectuals think nothing of drinking themselves to death as part of a cultural demonstration, unemployed workers are saved the bother of supporting themselves by being turned into sandwich meat, and artistic rebels from the human realm are enshrined in the Great Tabernacle as saints. Gruesome as life is there in some ways, the Kappas are refreshingly honest about their practices, and it's a return to the world above that drives the narrator insane and sends him to the mental asylum.

This novel, the last work by icon of Japanese letters Ryunosuke Akutagawa, is a darkly comic and surreal satire, which challenges all the conventions of so-called polite society.



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 one hundred and fifty in his short lifetime, including 'Rashomon', which inspired Kurosawa's classic film. 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 thirty-five by taking an overdose of barbiturates in the same year that Kappa was published.Geoffrey Bownas (1923-2011) founded the Department of Japanese Studies at Oxford in 1954 and went on to be the first professor of Japanese Studies at Sheffield University in 1965. He worked with Yukio Mishima to create the anthology New Writing in Japan (1972) and in 1974 co-authored Business in Japan: A Guide to Japanese Business Practice and Procedure. In 1999 Bownas was awarded the Japanese Order of the Sacred Treasure and in 2003 he was made CBE for his contributions to the improvement of Anglo-Japanese relations.



Enchanting and sometimes terrifying-a 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



A novel of exquisite precision



A tiny book with an irresistible quality...exquisite



A devilishly cool satire on human behaviour



A classic of our times, from a literature that deserves to be better known