I enjoyed Kappa, although I'm not sure that I entirely "got it". Maybe I don't know enough about Japanese society in the 1920s to recognise the social mores Akutagawa is satirising. That said, there was enough universally relevant stuff to keep me interested: swipes at capitalism and greed; artistic pretension, et al.There is an obvious poignancy about the suicide scene and the knowledge that Akutagawa took his own life a few months after writing this book.As has been said by another reviewer, I found the introduction and its brief biography to be more interesting than the work it prefaced.Kappa has left me wanting to delve deeper into Akutagawa's work. I'll have to read some more of his stuff and then come back to this again, I think.
