河童
By 芥川龍之介
Cover: A Farce on Fishing a Kappa (1937), painting by Ogawa Usen (1868–1938) · Wikimedia Commons · Public domain (artist died 1938)
A patient in an asylum tells how he fell into the land of the kappa, water-sprites whose country mirrors Japan's, with its own art, law and views of birth and death. Akutagawa's satire of 1927, written in the last months of his life, sees human society through the eyes of its odd and unsparing inhabitants.
Summary written with Claude Sonnet 5.5.