MONKEY 2024

MONKEY Vol 5: Creatures

Vol. 5 of MONKEY is 176 pages of full color, featuring the best of contemporary Japanese literature and new work by American writers (Kelly Link, Laird Hunt, and more!)—all friends of MONKEY. The pieces in this volume center on living creatures: from a dialogue between a crow and a dog, to a town's romance with a gazelle, fostering strange pets, living with a bear, following a cat, communing with wild boars, and more! Satoshi Kitamura contributed a series of graphic vignettes entitled "Fish in Muddy Waters."

Paperback 176 pages, full color
Dimensions ‏ 7x 10 inches
ISBN paperback: 979-8-9886887-6-1
ISBN ebook: 979-8-9886887-7-8

Paperback - $20.00 PREORDER — SHIPS FALL 2024
ePub, PDF - $9.99

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VOLUME 5 | 2024

This Precious Opportunity
a story by Aoko Matsuda
translated by Polly Barton

Tamba-Sasayama
a story by Sachiko Kishimoto
translated by Margaret Mitsutani

White Dog, Black Crow
an excerpt from The Holy Family by Hideo Furukawa
translated by Kendall Heitzman

A Phone Call from Emily Dickinson
a poem by Inuo Taguchi
translated by Leo Elizabeth Takada

Bird’s-Eye View
a chapter from Sheltering from Reality by Kyōhei Sakaguchi
translated by Sam Malissa

After two years in a first-floor apartment, the tenant realizes that a certain cat would pass along the street in front at precisely the same time each day; following the cat, the tenant sees it disappear into a vacant house; when the tenant first moved into the apartment, the house wasn’t vacant
a story by Tomoka Shibasaki
translated by Polly Barton

Selections from
Communications from a Wandering Comet
five poems by Makoto Takayanagi
translated by Michael Emmerich

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Creatures: A Monkey’s Dozen

Cathedral
a story by Hiromi Kawakami
translated Ted Goossen

Bearman
a story by Natsuki Ikezawa
translated by Chris Corker

Other People’s Ghost Stories
a story by Kelly Link

The Heron
a selection from the novel Gretel and the Great War by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

Fish in Muddy Waters
graphic vignettes by Satoshi Kitamura

Four Poems
Sawako Nakayasu

The Q-Town Gazelle
a story by Kikuko Tsumura
translated by Polly Barton

Hildisvínis
a story by Hiromi Itō
translated by Jeffrey Angles

Four Modern Haiku Poets on Encounters with Creatures
selected and translated by Andrew Campana

A Bear’s Tale
a story by Laird Hunt

Discoveries
a story by Hiroko Oyamada
translated by David Boyd

To Abuse a Monster
a story by Kaori Fujino
translated by Laurel Taylor

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A Night in Anton’s Basement
a story by Midori Osaki
translated by Asa Yoneda and David Boyd

Utō: A Noh Play
from the modern Japanese translation by Seikō Itō
translated and with an introduction by Jay Rubin

True Story and They Say
two poems by Eleni Sikelianos

An Empty Shell
a story by Ichiyō Higuchi
translated by Hitomi Yoshio

Remembering Seiji Ozawa
an essay by Haruki Murakami
translated by Ted Goossen

Letter to the Silent Book Club
by Eric McCormack

What do you do when a straightforward translation sounds weird?
Remarks from twelve translators

Jeffrey Angles on peculiar poetry and lucid prose
Sonja Arntzen on the power of names
David Boyd in defense of weirdness
Ted Goossen on translating onomatopoeias
Kendall Heitzman on discovering what a thing meant
Sam Malissa on putting the pieces together
Jay Rubin on the freedom to improvise
Mariko Saitō on Japanese loanwords in Korean
Motoyuki Shibata on “you”
Asa Yoneda on rooms to dream in
Hitomi Yoshio on titles and cover designs
Anna Zielinska-Elliott on the temptation to add

Contributors

Credits