A Japanese Canadian woman writer, Hiromi Goto took her departure "from the historical 'fact' into the realms of the contemporary folk legend" in her debut novel, Chorus of Mushrooms. Her journey into the realms of the contemporary folk legends enables Goto to write works across generic borders while not leaving "historical 'fact'" forgotten. As Goto explains, in an interview with Debbie Notkin, that Japanese mythologies and legends "layer the reading of story," her kappa trilogy demonstrates the endless possibilities of retelling kappa legends. This paper tries to reexamine The Kappa Child among Goto's kappa trilogy within the context of kappa or water-sprite narrative, and give emphasis to a layer of the novel steeped in the history of immigration and settlement in North America.
The kappa cannot essentially be interpreted as a figure rooted in Japanese culture: it travels. According to comparative studies of kappa legend, people across Eurasia share legends in which a water-sprite pulls a horse or cattle into water and thus the kappa legend cannot be defined as being original to Japanese creature. In more popular imagination, it is said that the kappa has emigrated from China via the Yangtze and the Yellow River to southern Japan.
Given that it settled in the Canadian prairie after traveling across Eurasia and emigrating to Japan, Goto's kappa would call attention to one layer of the novel that delineates the history of immigration and settlement. In this layer of the novel, Goto links the history of a Japanese postwar immigrant family together with the history of pioneering and Native Americans since the beginning of the Nations as well as the history of the wartime internment of Japanese North Americans. Thus The Kappa Child is a work that intermediates between story-telling and history-telling.