Word: akutagawa
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...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...
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...
...Author Akutagawa, at 35, found it impossible to take Mag's advice. Shortly after Kappa was published, he killed himself...
...family, has a naive charm until readers recall that "Ashihei Hino" is really Katsunori Tamai, known to a highbrow handful of Japanese readers for his The Warship on the Mountain, The Fish with Poison, for which in the past two years he has won Japan's highest Akutagawa Prize for literature. Translater is pacifist Birth-Controller Baroness Shidzué Ishimoto, who translated the book out of "deep devotion to my country...