{"id":34750,"date":"2014-04-26T07:39:05","date_gmt":"2014-04-26T11:39:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/?p=34750"},"modified":"2014-04-26T10:16:52","modified_gmt":"2014-04-26T14:16:52","slug":"jq-magazine-book-review-monkey-business-volume-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/2014\/04\/26\/jq-magazine-book-review-monkey-business-volume-4\/","title":{"rendered":"JQ Magazine: Book Review\u2014\u2018Monkey Business Volume 4\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“In part, this collection is a quest. And it is a quest into questions, many of which straddle the thin lines of life, all the while hurling us through time and space, water and air, pain and pleasure, and beginnings and ends.” (A Public Space)<\/p><\/div>\n

By <\/i><\/b>Brett Rawson<\/i><\/b><\/a> (<\/i><\/b>Akita-ken<\/i><\/b><\/a>, 2007-09) for <\/i><\/b>JQ magazine<\/i><\/b><\/a>. Brett is a writer, translator, and volunteer. He currently lives in New York, where he is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at The New School and is the professional development chair for the <\/i><\/b>JET Alumni Association of New York<\/i><\/b><\/a>. If you have job opportunities for JET alums, an interest in presenting at JETAANY\u2019s annual Career Forum, or want to collaborate on professional endeavors, contact him at <\/i><\/b>career@jetaany.org<\/i><\/b><\/a>.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Meet Volume 4<\/em> of <\/span>Monkey Business International: New Writings from Japan<\/i><\/a>, a collection of 23 works that will take you on a wild ride through the literary landscape of Japan. In fact, it goes beyond the boundaries of Japan\u2014as summed up by co-founders Motoyuki Shibata and Ted Goossen in the <\/span>preface<\/a>, <\/span>Monkey Business International<\/i> is \u201c60 percent contemporary Japan, 20 percent contemporary American and British, and 20 percent modern classic Japan,\u201d though of course not every hybrid has a categorical home.<\/span><\/p>\n

In part, this collection is a quest. And it is a quest into questions, many of which straddle the thin lines of life, all the while hurling us through time and space, water and air, pain and pleasure, and beginnings and ends. Take for example the short story \u201cThe Man Who Turned into a Buoy\u201d by Masatsugu Ono. The title itself seems to whisper, <\/span>loosen your grip, <\/i>encouraging us to suspend our disbelief and simply enjoy as our perspective gets gently nudged out of ordinary orbit.<\/span><\/p>\n

The tale transports us to a tiny town nestled between the shoreline and the hills, which is overrun with frolicking monkeys who descend to steal food left on graves, but have been known at times to talk with villagers, and sometimes in the voice of the deceased. This town also observes the tradition of the body as a buoy\u2014a single man tasked with the job of nakedly floating at the edge of the inlet during the day, issuing warnings to people who exit the bay. The man who turned into the buoy is the narrator\u2019s grandfather, and his story is recounted through the grandmother in a dense dialect that is beautifully captured by translator Michael Emmerich.<\/span><\/p>\n

When the narrator asked why the grandfather was the chosen one, his grandmother replied, \u201cMabcuz hehzgot maw hairn anyone, anit blackrn coal lemtel\u2014ontopwhat heh hadsum normous head onjhit sholds, ahuy thatee did\u201d (<\/span>maybe because he\u2019s got more hair than anyone, and it\u2019s blacker than coal let me tell\u2014on top of that he had some enormous head on his shoulders, ay that he did<\/i>). There is little that\u2019s certain about the history and order of the buoy\u2014how the human buoy began, what role it really served, why the grandfather was chosen and by whom, and why the grandfather\u2019s reply was a simple \u201cI see.\u201d The narrator guides us through his thoughts, as he wonders what it means, beneath the surface, to stay in place, anchorless, and serve as a marker for others when you yourself have no marker. But as the narrator says, \u201cno one really knows the truth, and the presence of an explanation doesn\u2019t change reality.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The other short stories take you to faraway worlds of their own, some of which, similar to the story above, make it clear from their titles alone: \u201cThe Girl Behind the Register Blows Bubbles\u201d by Keita Jin; \u201cThe Little Girl Blows Up Her Pee Anxiety, My Heart Races\u201d by Mieko Kawakami; \u201cDemon Beasts\u201d by Gen\u2019ichiro Takahashi; \u201cThe Bears of Mount Nametoko: A Remix of a Tale by Kenji Miyazawa\u201d by Hideo Furukawa; and \u201cThe Restaurant of Many Orders\u201d by Kenji Miyazawa, to name a few. But there is much more than simply the short story. There is Richard Powers\u2019 essay, \u201cThe Global Distributed Self-Mirroring Subterranean Neurological Soul-Sharing Picture Show: On Haruki Murakami\u2019s Fiction,\u201d which will test the powers of your concentration as he offers neurological insight into why Murakami has grown so globally loved; Mina Ishikawa\u2019s \u201cThe Lighthouse on the Desk,\u201d which are <\/span>tanka <\/i>poems that interact with Genji Ishikawa\u2019s <\/span>The Lighthouse <\/i>from 1914; the manga \u201cTailors\u2019 Dummies\u201d by Brother and Sister Nishioka, which is based on the short story by Bruno Schulz, and much more.<\/span><\/p>\n

I read through the collection in a single day, though it feels like that day has yet to end, as the feelings from these stories continue to float around the periphery of my perspective. As I sank into each story, I often felt my mind wander down the corridors of my memories of living in Kisakata-machi in Akita, a coastal town that sits between the Sea of Japan and Mount Chokai. As these stories straddled lines of life, language, familiarity, and reality, I recalled how it felt to move and live somewhere unfamiliar, but how that feeling slowly faded away, as the people, place, culture, and country came into a familiar focus. It is odd how the magical world of words in these stories, intangible as it sometime seemed, caused me to recall such palpable and personal moments.<\/span><\/p>\n

As I closed the back cover, I hopped online to order the first three volumes. There is still much mystery to the monkey and its musing, but the first story, \u201cEverybody\u2019s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey\u201d by Craft Ebbing & Co., offered a hint of help by spelling things out for us: halve <\/span>monkey<\/i> and you get <\/span>mon <\/i>and <\/span>key; mon <\/i>means <\/span>my<\/i> in French or <\/span>gate<\/i> in Japanese; so perhaps we have <\/span>my key <\/i>or <\/span>gate key; <\/i>but on the QWERTY keyboard, the Japanese characters <\/span>mo <\/i>and <\/span>n <\/i>lie on the keys marked with Roman letters <\/span>m <\/i>and <\/span>y; <\/i>and so perhaps we have in our hands two signs that say the <\/span>monkey<\/i> is <\/span>our key<\/i>. I don\u2019t know what the monkey unlocks, but I do know one thing for sure: there is no such thing as too much <\/span>Monkey Business<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

For those living in New York, come meet those responsible for all this <\/i><\/b>Monkey Business, as contributing authors Toh EnJoe, Hideo Furukawa, Laird Hunt, Matthew Sharpe, founding editors Motoyuki Shibata and Ted Goossen, and contributing editor <\/i><\/b>Roland Kelts<\/i><\/b><\/a> (<\/i><\/b>Osaka-shi<\/i><\/b><\/a>, 1998-99) come to celebrate the launch of <\/i>Volume 4 from May 3-5 (see full schedule <\/i><\/b>here<\/i><\/b><\/a>).<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

For more <\/i><\/b>JQ coverage of <\/i>Monkey Business, <\/i><\/b>click here<\/i><\/b><\/a>.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Brett Rawson (Akita-ken, 2007-09) for JQ magazine. Brett is a writer, translator, and volunteer. He currently lives in New York, where he is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at The New School and is the professional development chair for the JET Alumni Association of New York. If you have job opportunities for JET […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[40,291,58,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-jq-magazine","category-reviews","category-roland-kelts"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkZ7m-92u","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34750"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34764,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34750\/revisions\/34764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}