Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and Allison Markin Powell are the translators of a new edition of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Kappa. First published in 1927, Kappa revolves around Patient No. 23, a man who tumbles into the world of the kappas like Alice into Wonderland. As he learns about their world, he makes—and loses—friends, watches foetuses choose whether to be born, and observes cannibalistic labour practices. In this interview, the two translators talk to us about the book, its political prescience, and the world of Japanese-English literary translation.
MPS: To start with, can you tell us about what a Kappa is, and what place it has in the Japanese literary and cultural imagination? (I thought the Kappa was very scary as a child, and so I found the beginning of the story—where Patient 23 chases after the first Kappa he encounters—alarming!)
AMP: Drawing from folklore and legend, Akutagawa describes them as child-sized creatures, similar to frogs with webbed feet and hands, chameleon-like skin, a pouch on their belly, and a plate on their head that grows harder as they age. As you mention, children learn to fear these river-dwelling creatures, and although Akutagawa does not mention it in his novel, kappa are said to love to extract the shirikodama—a small ball located in a human’s anus in which supposedly the soul resides—from the unwary.
Kappa are among the most well-known yokai—supernatural spirits and entities in Japanese folklore. So whereas English-language readers may not be familiar with kappa, Akutagawa must have assumed that they would be commonly known by those who read his work in 1927. Nevertheless, the narrative structure of Kappa resembles Western tales such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) as well as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872).
MPS: It seems that readers and critics of Kappa have been torn between two interpretations of the work, some seeing it as satire of Taishō mores and others as an expression of personal anxiety. Have you found yourself on one side or another? What is Kappa about, for you?
AMP: I don’t feel the need to choose! It’s very easy to interpret it as a satire of Taisho-era Japanese society—one that has remarkably longstanding resonance, even almost a hundred years later in our late-stage capitalist era, even in Western countries—and Akutagawa’s own fragile mental state is also blatantly on display (Kappa being his last work, written the same year that he died by suicide). There is much discussion of great men who have or have not, successfully or not, attempted suicide, as well as a keen awareness of literary legacies. But for me, as a translator, it’s important not to take sides, so to speak. I always strive to maintain the ambiguities and ambivalence contained in the text, in an attempt to recreate the experience of reading the work in Japanese and enabling readers of the translation to form their own opinion. I try not to eliminate possible interpretations.
LHK: I agree with Allison here—it’s important not to foreclose any possible interpretations for readers of the text. That said, what struck me about Kappa this time around was the role that translation itself plays within the text. The majority of the book takes place in a foreign country called “Kappa Land” (Kappa no kuni), and most of the dialogue is said to occur in the Kappa language (Kappa no kotoba), meaning that the narrator of the book, Patient No. 23, is as much a translator as he is a storyteller. He frequently interjects to remind the reader that he “may very well have gotten some details of the story wrong” given that he is not a native speaker of Kappa no kotoba, leaving him uncertain about whether he may be mishearing or else misremembering something that some Kappa had said to him. This leads me to two thoughts—the first is that Akutagawa himself was a literary translator, and the second is that in Japan, modernity arrived via translation. Eri Matsuo Nakagawa, a friend of mine who is a translation studies scholar, has pointed out how Akutagawa’s early translations of English authors like WB Yeats profoundly shaped his own literary style. At the same time, since translation was the vehicle through which modernity arrived in Japan, we see numerous references to the act of translation in other Akutagawa works, such as Cogwheels, where the narrator answers the phone, hears the person on the other line say something that sounds like “mole,” which the narrator mishears as “mort” the French word for death. If translation was how modernity (and Westernization) arrived in Japan, and modernity entailed a dizzying fragmentation of culture and identity, and even what constituted Japanese (as a huge influx of foreign words entered the language all at once). I think we can see a lot of this reflected in the way that knowledge and identity are constantly destabilized in Akutagawa’s work, particularly his later work. We can of course attribute some of this to his own mental illness, but that seems like too easy an interpretation to me. For me, KAPPA is a commentary on the destabilizing and fragmentary effects of modernization on the individual person—their ability to know or access reality or certainty at all.
MPS: What do you think we’re to make of the story’s politics? There are certainly some intriguing moments. I’m thinking about the non-working Kappas who are simply eaten—and the parallel drawn between that and prostitution—and the gender and family critique which appears throughout Patient 23’s story.
LHK: So much of the text feels prescient because it portrays the absurdities of capitalism—the advanced industrial society that invents “seven or eight hundred kinds of new contraptions per month, so that goods can be mass-produced without even hiring a labor force,” and then simply “eats” the workers whose labor has been displaced by the machines. I can’t help but think of the strikes at Amazon, Starbucks, and various universities that have been in the news lately, and the ongoing brutal suppression of workers whose labor is constantly being made redundant by technological progress. And of course, when the narrator says that “Here in Kappa Land, all you needed to do was funnel raw materials —paper, ink and gray powder— into a huge machine, and within a matter of minutes, out came countless books of all shapes and sizes,” I can’t help but think of the recent conversations around Chat GPT, where all one needs to do is enter a couple of words into an AI and out comes an entire, machine-generated novel.
AMP: One might assume that the critique of the family system has origins in the upheaval of Akutagawa’s childhood, namely his mother’s mental illness and being adopted into his maternal uncle’s family. The scenes that imagine Kappa childbirth are hilarious and sad, and may have inspired contemporary authors as well (e.g., Li Kotomi’s 「生を祝う」or ‘Life Celebration’). As for gender critique… Lisa and I took this opportunity as the first women to translate Akutagawa into English—and the first to translate Kappa this century—not to obscure the misogyny that is portrayed in the book.
MPS: What drew you to Akutagawa’s Kappa? In some ways, it hasn’t been a very well-received piece of work. (I’m thinking of things like Donald Keene’s dismissal of Kappa as “lacking in resourcefulness.”) Do you think that critics like Keene have missed something about Kappa? More broadly, have Japanese-English translators missed something about Akutagawa?
AMP: The idea for a new translation originated with Barbara Epler, the publisher and editor-in-chief of New Directions. She thought it could use a fresh take, and it isn’t unusual for classics to be translated again for a new generation. The bestsellerdom of Osamu Dazai’s 「人間失格」(No Longer Human) has prompted more than one recent and forthcoming translation. Personally, I was only superficially familiar with Akutagawa’s works and his position within the literary canon, but having had the chance to translate Dazai’s Schoolgirl, it seemed like a fun opportunity—and that’s why I suggested to Lisa that we co-translate it.
Beyond the scope of critics of Japanese literature, I think that reading tastes and habits have changed quite a bit as well. Not long ago, it would have been an uphill battle to convince a publisher to produce a novella this length as a standalone volume, but nowadays, it’s quite common. So to be able to give our attention to such a compact text, with the full support of an editor such as Barbara, was a gift.
MPS: Kappa itself is divided into a number of shorter episodes, scenes from Patient 23’s life with the Kappas. Do you have a favourite? (My personal favourite is the one with the fetus who ‘does not wish to be born.’)
AMP: Tough to choose! But Lisa and I are both partial to the séance scene with Tok, in which Akutagawa seems to poke fun at authors’ narcissism and reveals such prescience about literary legacies and reputations.
LHK: Agree with Allison here! The seance chapter is by far my favourite part of the book, and the most fun to translate. I haven’t seen it mentioned in scholarly commentary as often as the famous birth chapter, but I think the seance chapter is Akutagawa making fun of the concept of modern authorship. The fact that Tok discusses the copyright for his book of poems expiring was also hilarious to us, because Akutagawa’s own work actually enters the public domain this very year!
MPS: I’d like to pivot to translation. What brought you to translation? How do you think of your role as a translator?
AMP: Translation is a form of writing, a creative endeavour that requires a highly specific skill set. I came to literary translation very deliberately, from the publishing angle (vs the academic). I wanted to know who were the players within the industry—who decides which books get translated, who hires the translators, and what these decisions are based upon. When bringing Japanese books to an English-language market (this applies to other language pairs as well, of course), translators often do a lot of the work of facilitating relationships—between the publisher in Japan and the editor in the US or UK, or helping to apply for grants or awards, or representing the author to readers once the book is published. And it’s basically impossible not to take an active role in that whole process.
LHK: I came to translation comparatively late (and am still quite new to the profession as a whole). I think I’m drawn to it because for a long time Japanese and English occupied very different parts of my life and I often struggled with ways to bring them together in meaningful ways. Literary translation allows me to bring the two languages into dialogue on my own terms. I think of my role as a translator as something akin to a musician or an actor, or any kind of artist that interprets and brings to life an idea that someone else has conceived and written down on the page. But like any art, translation comes with a lot of responsibility. I’m aware that my translations are shaped by my own reading of a text, but my reading is all that English readers are going to get—which sometimes feels very scary. It’s not a responsibility I take lightly.
MPS: You recently pointed out on Twitter that there are very few professional Japanese-English translators who are women or people of color. How has the field come to be so skewed? Do you think the dominance of white men as translators has had an effect on Anglophone perceptions of Japanese literature or culture? Do you think it has had an effect on the translated texts themselves?
AMP: I’ve done a lot of advocacy for translators as workers and, more specifically, for women translators and translators of women writers. In 2016 I co-founded the collective Strong Women, Soft Power with Ginny Tapley Takemori and Lucy North; our goal is to promote Japanese women writers in translation. As part of SWSP, I compiled some data on writers in Japan—the gender breakdown of writers who have been awarded the Akutagawa and Naoki Prizes and also who have written the top fifty bestselling books since 2012, and found that there was something close to parity. Compared with the gender breakdown of authors whose books have been translated into English during that same period, the disconnect is astonishing. There has been some correction very recently—quite a few women writers have been translated and published in English for the first time—but it isn’t clear why there is such an inaccurate reflection of the current Japanese literary landscape in English.
When it comes to the gender breakdown among translators, Japanese literature in English translation was for a very long time dominated by white male academics. One can draw various conclusions, whether that’s about editors’ lack of access or gatekeeping or something else—and this phenomenon is certainly not limited to Japanese translation. The historic and relatively low remuneration for translators also meant that many of the people who translated books into English were doing it as an avocation rather than a profession; since academia is already skewed white and male, it stands to reason that these were the people whom editors commissioned to do translations. But this, too, is shifting in recent years. There are more professional translators and more conversations being had about the myriad choices involved in publishing literature in translation.
LHK: I echo what Allison says above about the long overlap between the worlds of academia and translation, particularly in a language like Japanese. While it is true that academia generally tends to skew white and male, in the case of Japanese, I would also say that a contributing factor is the fact that many of the first Japanese literary translators in the US learned Japanese in the military, and then subsequently picked up academic posts after the war. This was true of Donald Keene, Edward Seidensticker, and many others. The US State Department invested an immense amount of money and resources into training military recruits in Japanese for intelligence purposes. One thing that interests me about this is that many of these recruits were actually Japanese Americans with knowledge of Japanese, who were (often forcibly) tasked with translating and decoding ‘enemy’ Japanese documents. And yet, almost none of these Japanese Americans continued to translate after the war in the same way that people like Keene or Seidensticker did. Part of that, of course, had to do with discriminatory hiring practices in academia (which still exist) and part of it, too, was the immense pressure on Japanese Americans after the war to distance themselves from the Japanese language and anything to do with Japan, for fear of being associated with a recent wartime enemy. For them, the path forward was to assimilate wholly into (white) American culture, demonstrate that they were loyal and upstanding citizens, and prove that they had severed ties to Japan altogether—while white men like Keene and Seidensticker were immediately offered academic positions and celebrated for their ‘scholarly’ expertise on a foreign culture. In fact, I believe the authority, trust, and credibility automatically lent to them by their whiteness was part of what helped to ‘rehabilitate’ the image of Japan after the war as their translations helped to shift public perception around Japan from a culture that was seen as vicious and bloodthirsty and fascist to one that was elegant and peaceful and ‘aesthetic.’
I think it is important to think about this history because it continues to shape the practice of translation today. Because the field of Japanese literary translation remains so overwhelmingly white, translators of color continue to see the field as one that is not open to them as a viable career path. They cannot even imagine themselves as professional literary translators because there are so few precedents or models for them. I have done a lot of advocacy work myself to try and lower barriers for translators of color wanting to enter the field of literary translation, to try and share information, resources, and opportunities rather than gatekeeping them among closed networks of privileged actors. I wish that more of the (white) literary translators of Japanese would think more about the historical dynamics that have shaped their own desires for Japan as a place and as a culture, and do more to actively support and nurture translators of color who haven’t been given a chance to do this work.
In terms of the identities of the translators having an effect on the translated works themselves—what I have tended to notice is that women translators and translators of color are the ones who are often choosing works that show a non-mainstream side of life in Japan. Takami Nieda, for example, has been consistently translating and advocating for works of Zainichi literature (Japanese literature written by ethnically Korean people), and largely thanks to her effort, we are now starting to see more receptivity to Zainichi literature in English. Arthur Reiji Morris translated a book by Li Kotomi, a Taiwanese author who writes in Japanese. Kalau Almony is working on translating what may be one of the first novels by a Black Japanese author. I think many of us are drawn to translating work like this because we ourselves occupy complicated or marginalized positions in our own countries. So to me, diversifying translators means we will get a richer and more complex portrait of contemporary Japanese literature.
MPS: What are you reading these days, and what should your readers pick up after Kappa?
LHK: I’m currently working on translating one of Yuko Tsushima’s later novels, called Wildcat Dome, a historical epic about a group of mixed-race orphans in postwar Japan who are haunted by the murder of one of their friends. That should be out with FSG sometime in late 2024 or early 2025. I’m also at work on a recent novel by Kirino Natsuo, the bestselling author of OUT. Her latest novel is a noir that tackles the class dynamics of surrogacy in contemporary Japan. It will also be out sometime in 2025.
I should also mention that Ryan Choi’s translation of a collection of “very short” stories by Akutagawa that have never before been translated will be out later this year with a press called Paper and Ink, under the title: In Dreams: The Very Short Stories of Akutagawa. Ryan has been working on these pieces for quite some time, his translations are excellent, and I wholeheartedly recommend this collection to any Akutagawa fans.