The Kappa in nineteenth-century Japanese illustrated sources

Record summary

Nineteenth-century Japanese books, prints and local accounts document the kappa as a named water being associated with rivers, drowning, wrestling and attacks on people or livestock. The lead matters because it offers a large body of localized reports, images and explanatory traditions rather than one isolated sighting. It can support comparison of body descriptions, danger narratives and later naturalistic reinterpretations. The kappa is a folkloric creature, and many accounts are didactic, comic or religiously inflected. Verification requires separating nineteenth-century material from much older legends and twentieth-century popular culture.