In the days of the late Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the "banzais" of sword-shaking Japanese drowned out their more intelligent countrymen. The world of the '305 and the '405 had no chance to learn that modern Japan has also produced a fair quota of writers, thinkers and even humorists. Last month the work of one of them, a 2O-year-old novelette called Kappa, was first published in English translation. To American readers, Ryunosuke Akutagawa's satire seemed almost too good to have been written by a Japanese.
Akutagawa's kappa are a race of Oriental leprechauns, seldom over three feet tall, with short, ugly faces and webbed hands and feet. Like chameleons, they can change the color of their skins at will. Other kappa marks are large beaks and kangaroo pouches.
Eve Came First. The only known visitor to the kappa country is Patient No. 23 in an insane asylum near Tokyo, who claims to have lived for months in the land of the kappa. No. 23 found the kappa pleasant, if unpredictable people, with their traditions often the reverse of human customs. They believe, for example, that the first kappa was a woman, who could not abide living alone. God pitied her and, taking her brain, created a male companion. His only instructions to the new couple were to eat, multiply and live as expansively as possible.
For later kappa women, a good man was harder to find. Under a firm system of courtship in reverse, she-kappa had to chase and capture their husbands. In these efforts they were often assisted by parents, brothers and sisters. ("Oh, how miserable the he-kappa is!")
The only uncaptured kappa man was Mag, the philosopher, who was too ugly and stayed inside his house almost all the time reading books in a dusky room lighted by a seven-color glass lantern. When No. 23 congratulated him on his bachelorhood, Mag sighed, said wistfully: "It's quite natural that you don't see how we feel, because you are not a kappa. But occasionally I myself desire those dreadful she-kappa to run after me."
Among kappa families, birth control has been greatly refined and democratized. Just before birth the father calls in a loud voice to his unborn child to see if it wishes to enter the world. If the answer is no, the midwife injects some liquid into the mother's abdomen, which promptly shrinks to normal size.
Workers Come Cheap. Parts of Akutagawa's book might have come from Dean Swift. Accompanied by Gael, "a capitalist of capitalists," No. 23 visited some kappa factories. His guide told him that each month the kappa invent seven or eight hundred new machines which throw 40 or 50,000 kappa out of work. When No. 23 wondered about the absence of labor trouble, his kappa friends explained nonchalantly: "They are all eaten up. We kill all those workers and eat their flesh. This month 64,769 workers have been dismissed and the price of meat has dropped."
"Do they meekly consent to be killed?" asked No. 23.
"It's no use making a fuss," said Pep (the kappa judge), who sat frowning in front of a wild peach in a pot, "we've got the workers' Butchery Law."
The kappa thought No. 23's horror at eating kappa meat pure sentimentality, since everyone knew that in Japan girls from poor families were regularly sold to brothels.*