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Kappa books are manufactured by throwing paper, ink and a mysterious grey powder into the funnel-shaped mouths of giant machines. In less than five minutes' time the machines can produce a flood of different volumes—seven million each year. The powder is "just rubbish—brains of asses dried and ground."
Death Came Early. One day, No. 23 left the kappa and returned to Japan. He could never again discover the entrance to their country, was finally confined by skeptical authorities. He regarded his stay in the asylum with resignation, remembering the words of Mag, the kappa philosopher: "The wisest way of life is to look with contempt at the customs of an age, but nonetheless to live so as not in the least to destroy them."
Author Akutagawa, at 35, found it impossible to take Mag's advice. Shortly after Kappa was published, he killed himself.
* The problem of machines and employment has long been a favorite topic of satirists. In A Modest Proposal Swift similarly suggested that poor Irish mothers be permitted to sell their year-old offspring for 10 shillings. The babies could then be slaughtered, sold as edible meat. This would limit excessive population, furnish a new source of food supply. Clarence Day's Animals in a Machine Age advocated training squirrels to operate textile bobbins, raccoons to run railways. While they worked it would be in the employer's best interest to keep them healthy and fat; when business slackened, the meat of those laid off could be sold at a discount. Citizens of Samuel Butler's mythical Erewhon outlawed and destroyed all but the most primitive mechanisms. Scraps of the forbidden machines were kept as museum pieces to warn Erewhonians what not to invent.