The Kappa Child [Paperback]

In her second novel, The Kappa Child, Hiromi Goto continues her exploration of growing up Japanese Canadian that she began in A Chorus of Mushrooms (winner of the Commonwealth Writers regional prize for best first book). In The Kappa Child, her heroine turns to an unlikely (and ultimately frustrating) guide: the Little House on the Prairie books of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Even more unlikely is that the unnamed narrator finds herself pregnant by a Kappa, a mythical Japanese being with webbed feet, an affinity for water, and a bowl growing on its head. The Kappa Child looks back at the dysfunctional childhood of the narrator, with her passive-aggressive mother, odd siblings, and abusive, delusional father struggling to grow rice in the prairie dust bowl. Not quite an adult, the narrator struggles to come to terms with her past and her less-than-promising present and achieves an unexpected moment of satori in the process. As in her first book, Goto continues to combine poetic, even surreal, turns of phrase with an understated but sharp-edged version of feminist post-structuralism, all wrapped up in a picaresque, magic-realist narrative. What fabulous creatures will inhabit her next novel? --Robyn Gillam

"A fairy tale that's well worth the wait. . . .Goto handles her theme with lightness and a sense of compassion that is, sadly, rare in contemporary fiction."

-- Alberta Views

"Highly imaginative."

-- World Literature Today

James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award for Science Fiction and Commonwealth Writers' Prize Winner, 2001

Sunburst Award Nomination for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, 2002

From the award-winning author of Chorus of Mushrooms, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in the Caribbean and Canadian Region and was co-winner of the Canada Japan Book Award, The Kappa Child is the tale of four Japanese Canadian sisters struggling to escape the bonds of a family and landscape as inhospitable as the sweltering prairie heat.

In a family not at all reminiscent of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, four Japanese-Canadian sisters struggle to escape the bonds of a family and landscape as inhospitable as the sweltering prairie heat. Their father, moved by an incredible dream of optimism, decides to migrate from the lush green fields of British Columbia to Alberta. There, he is determined to deny the hard-pan limitations of the prairie and to grow rice. Despite a dearth of both water and love, the family discovers, through sorrow and fear, the green kiss of the Kappa Child, a mythical creature who blesses those who can imagine its magic...

Hiromi Goto was born in Japan and moved with her family to British Columbia, Canada, when she was three. Her parents are mushroom farmers, and she spent most of her childhood living in rural areas. This experience, she says, continues to be a source of inspiration in her writing. Her work also is influenced by her father's stories of life in Japan, which she grew up hearing.