#kappa quartet

Kappa Quartet by Daryl Qilin Yam

It’s 9 am and I’ve just finished Kappa Quartet. I’m not sure what I think about it, because I’d always thought it would end cheerily. Slightly past the midpoint mark last night I noted: “The story grows on you. The characters come together in greater numbers and more frequently, and they meld together like members taking position in a symphonic orchestra.” In some senses the ends of some characters reflected their sad situations in life - sometimes something had to give, like in the trio’s case. There was quite a lot of irony, and sometimes there is the sense of people missing out on deeper conversations because they politely held back on pushing topics - like in the case of Mr Shimao and Ahab. Daryl weaves in quite a bit of detail in various places - dates and names that I miss because I’m still a skimming reader. This is a very vague and sparse review, I must say. 

In the earlier bits of the story I felt like some lines were dropped because they sounded poetic, the kind of line you wave your hand about and try to grab from the air and say wistfully. Perhaps because some of them didn’t strike me as being specific to the situation. They were apt, but they didn’t seem solely applicable to whatever was being talked about. A friend once said something about a Naomi Kawase movie about a town, that Kawase doesn’t explicitly state things. She shows them for a while, and if you haven’t gotten it by then she just moves on. Given the structure of Kappa Quartet, with each chapter narrated from the POV of a different character, and the characters featured dependent on the experiences of the narrator, readers are not made aware of the fates of all characters. We only know of what happened in the end to three out of the many characters, and while I was surprised at how the novel narrowed to a point in its conclusion given its number of characters, I wasn’t displeased by it because I had accepted by this point that Kappa Quartet wasn’t going to be the sunshine and roses story I assumed it would be. 

Man, what a lot of rambling on my part. Quick notes: 

There was a point where I thought that though humans do not have the cavities in their skulls Kappas have, quite a few human characters had deficiencies reminscent of those holes. 

Also, I noticed myself fearing Kappas “turning rogue” or causing trouble, or being the cause of trouble in some sense, which made me examine this form of xenophobia in me. 

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