A psychiatric patient, who is known only as "Number 23", tells the story of a time he visited the land of the kappa. He had lost his way in the mountains of
Hotakadake and was surrounded by a group of the strange creatures, who then showed him around their home. They explain to him the kappas' religion, called Lifeism, whose god, the
Tree of Life, teaches them to 'live avidly'. He found that the world of the kappa often appeared to be the opposite of how things were in the human world. For instance, foetuses are asked by their fathers whether or not they want to be born. One replied, "I do not wish to be born. In the first place, it makes me shudder to think of all the things I shall inherit from my father—the insanity alone is bad enough." The psychiatric patient relates how he met with kappa of many occupations. One of them, Geeru, told him that unemployed laborers are gassed and then eaten by the other kappa. Patient 23 also encountered Maggu, a philosopher writing a collection of
aphorisms titled
The Words of a Fool, which included the line "a fool always considers others fools". He met another kappa called Tokku, a
sceptical poet who had committed
suicide and appeared to Patient 23 as a ghost by means of
necromancy. Tokku, while concerned about being famous after his death, admires writers and philosophers who have killed themselves, such as
Heinrich von Kleist,
Philipp Mainländer and
Otto Weininger. He esteems
Michel de Montaigne who justified voluntary death, but dislikes
Arthur Schopenhauer because he was a pessimist who did not commit suicide. On his return to the real world, Patient 23 muses that the kappa were clean and superior to human society and becomes a
misanthrope. == Reception ==