A film about the death of a world told through the disappearance of creatures nobody can prove existed. Japan's industrial rise didn't just pave over rivers, it erased the possibility of wonder itself. The real tragedy isn't that kappa are gone; it's that we stopped believing they could be there.
Japanese folklore speaks of kappa, water imps said to live in rivers and lakes across the country. People long claimed to have seen them, and the creatures turn up in paintings, sculptures and stories. But as Japan becomes a heavily industrialized nation in the 20th century, lakes are reclaimed, riverbanks are paved with concrete, and farm chemicals pour into the land. Fish, insects, birds and animals lose their homes, and the kappa lose theirs too. The film brings back the waterside Japan of the days when kappa still lived there. It suggests that if further pollution is stopped and other creatures are given room to live, people might yet catch sight of them again. The film won the Oofuji Noburou Award at the 1998 Mainichi Film Awards.
