Kafka’s Nightmare Tale, ‘A Country Doctor,’ Animated

From Open Culture, this is a creepy Japanimation of Franz Kafka's eerie and dark short story, "A Country Doctor." Enjoy all 21-minutes of this strangeness!


Franz Kafka was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1883, and died in 1924. He is known for the intense visionary character of his novels, stories, parables, and sketches, all written in German. Less than one-quarter of his writing consists of completed works. The most famous of his works are the unfinished novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, and the short stories collected under the title The Penal Colony, from which this story is taken.

Kafka’s Nightmare Tale, ‘A Country Doctor,’ Told in Award-Winning Japanese Animation

December 5th, 2012

Here’s a good story for a cold December night: Franz Kafka’s cryptic, hallucinatory tale of “A Country Doctor.”

Written in Prague during the icy winter of 1916-1917, Kafka’s story unfolds in one long paragraph like a fevered nightmare. “I was in great perplexity,” says the narrator, an old doctor, as he sets out in a blizzard at night on an urgent but vague mission. But he can’t go anywhere. His horse, worn out by the winter, has just died and his servant girl is going door to door pleading for help. A surreal sequence of events follow.

“A Country Doctor” is permeated with the qualities that John Updike found so compelling in Kafka: “a sensation of anxiety and shame whose center cannot be located and therefore cannot be placated; a sense of an infinite difficulty within things, impeding every step; a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage and religious belief, must record every touch as pain.”

In 2007 the award-winning Japanese animator Koji Yamamura made a 21-minute film (see above) which captures some of the strangeness and beauty of Kafka’s story. It seems somehow appropriate that the dreamlike narrative has been transmuted into a form and language unknown to Kafka. And if you aren’t familiar with the original, you can read a translation of “A Country Doctor” by Willa and Edwin Muir. You can also find Kafka’s stories in our collection of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.

Related Content: 

• Franz Kafka: The Animated Short Film 

• Orson Welles Narrates Animated Version of Kafka’s Parable, “Before the Law”

I Want My Lorrie Moore!

I've always enjoyed Lorrie Moore's stories. I'm much prefer short stories to novels (in general) for the precision of the form, and Moore is a contemporary master. So I found sympathy with this article from Esquire:

I Want My Lorrie Moore!

July 8, 2008 at 5:00PM by Anya Yurchyshyn

Lorrie Moore is one of my favorite short story writers—I, like droves of others, love the obsessive self-consciousness of her characters, the preciseness of her language, her off-handed style.

So imagine my delight when I discovered there was a Collected Works of Lorrie Moore, one with previously unanthologized stories, one with an introduction by the woman herself. Then imagine my disgust when I realized the collection was available only in the UK. Hello? I was told this was the greatest place on earth by Nancy Regan AND Bruce Springsteen. Still trying to keep America down, huh England? This is some old colonial bullshit.

I didn’t even know they liked her over there. I would have thought she was too American. But no, they love her, mostly, and they love this book, the first she’s published in a decade. It’s supposed to be great. I love to know from first-hand experience, but it doesn’t look like I’m about to find out anytime soon.

The collection was published by Faber and Faber, and according to them, the collection is “unique to the UK” and is not due for a US release. That’s been confirmed by FSG, who would be a likely candidate for US distribution. In fact, no one seems to know anything about it here.

What a shame. I think the book would do really well. I’m going to have to comfort myself with her other collections. And this weird podcast of her reading Paper Losses, which was published in The New Yorker in 2006.

Tags: I Want My Lorrie Moore!, Esquire, short story, literature, authors, Anya Yurchyshyn

Short Fiction: Things Past

Things Past

The yearly cycle comes to an end. The slow, steady decline reverses, days no longer growing darker, shorter, collapsing beneath the weight of what has passed.

J stares at the stubble on his face, the shadowy reflection in his mirror. Wrinkles around his eyes, his mouth, reveal the age that seems so unreal.

He picks up the razor, sets it down again, then picks it up one more time. Three days growth. Until today he has not looked in a mirror. Three days feels like forever.

Forever begins again this day. The ancient renewal of the first day. But not for J. Three days ago time stopped and may never again restart.

_____

He tries to remember anything from the last three days, but all he sees is the inside of a cave. Dark. Cold. Maybe a bad dream. But he cannot make himself wake up.

Today is the first day. Reborn. From what to what he cannot recall. Everything from his past is lost in the desert. Covered in sand.

A lizard suns itself on granite. Cactus wrens squawk their alert that a stranger has entered their domain.

J stands before the mirror, wandering and lost in a vast, arid desert. His voice cannot escape his lips, sun-parched, cracked, mouthing the words of seemingly meaningless prayers.

His hand reaches to touch the mirror, but the surface is liquid, violable, lacking solidity. Like him.

_____

The face in the mirror smiles. It bears no resemblance to the man J thought he was. Once was. No more.

All around him the year swallows its tail. The ancient, archaic, always-present serpent. Trickster and tempter.

J reaches to touch his face, the wrinkled corners of his mouth, upturned. Against his volition. All sense of time and space misplaced, swimming in the dark depths behind his eyes.

Three days ago something happened. Feels like death, but still his lungs expand and contract, the heart beats. He is sweating and chilled, standing before the mirror, the razor beside the sink.

_____

A brief flash of illumination, then nothing. Recent wounds, now scars. Surrender. Acceptance.

December 25th. Three days ago he was raised from oblivion. Reconstituted. Given new form, but the loss of any sense of self.

J breaks the plastic razor against the ceramic sink, removes the blades. Three sharp blades, one for each day he cannot recall.

Solstice night. The darkest day and longest night. Three days ago. But what happened to bring him to this moment? Three days ago. What myth is embodied in his flesh?

_____

Early morning, day of the Nativity. It's time. J walks into the bathroom, places a small plastic plug into the drain, and fills the bathtub with hot water. He collects the blades and removes his t-shirt, Levis jeans, and boxer shorts.

The water is too hot, but he slowly lowers his body into the tub. With a precise hand, he makes the cuts, three incisions in his left arm. The water reddens.

There is no pain. Only the desert, searing sunlight, vultures circling, a cacophony of distant voices. And the snake, always the snake, tail in its mouth.

_____

The water slowly drains, the plug slightly loose. A red wring around the rim of the tub, but in its ceramic depths, an infant. Crying. Naked. Alone.

On this day, the word made flesh.

Tags: Short Fiction, Things Past, fiction, mythology, seasons, Solstice, Christmas