Monkey New Writing from Japan - by Ted Goossen & Motoyuki Shibata (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

For fans of Japanese literature (Haruki Murakami and more) and readers who want to be introduced to exciting new writers.

MONKEY New Writing from Japan is an annual anthology that showcases the best of contemporary Japanese literature. Vol. 6 celebrates HORROR, from demons and ghosts to the myriad existential and environmental fears that come with living in our troubled times. MONKEY offers short fiction and poetry by writers such as Haruki Murakami, Yoko Ogawa, and Hiromi Kawakami; graphic stories by Satoshi Kitamura; new translations of modern classics; and contributions from authors outside Japan.

Review Quotes

"MONKEY introduces me to writers who offer wild delights, who subvert and expand my sense of what narrative is capable of achieving. When a new MONKEY shows up on my doorstep, I greet it like an old friend, too long absent, who has returned with pockets full of strange and delicious gifts." --Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love


"MONKEY is a marvel, miraculously immune to literary convention, market pressure, and the laws of nature. It seems to come from the distant past or the far future -- either way, it's one of my favorite sanctuaries from the banality of the present." --Adam Ehrlich Sachs, author of Gretel and the Great War

"MONKEY is more fun than anything called literature has a right to be. Some of the most imaginative writing in the world just so happens to hail from Japan." --Roland Kelts, Nikkei Asia

"An astonishment, by turns playful and profound" --Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

"MONKEY is full of deep, funny, wild, scary, fabulous, moving, surprising, brilliant work." --Laird Hunt, author of Zorrie

"MONKEY has the coolest new and classic Japanese writers, and some extremely cool English-language writers too. Its graphics are also extremely cool. Whether you read MONKEY in Japanese or in English, you will be, at least for the duration of your reading, quite cool too."--Rebecca Brown, author of The Gifts of the Body

About the Author

TED GOOSSEN is a literary translator, professor emeritus at York University in Toronto, and one of the founding editors of Monkey Business and MONKEY New Writing from Japan. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories. He translated Haruki Murakami's Wind/Pinball and The Strange Library, and co-translated (with Philip Gabriel) Men Without Women and Killing Commendatore. He translated Hiromi Kawakami's novel The Third Love (2024) and her story collection Dragon Palace, published under the Monkey imprint with Stone Bridge Press in 2023.

MOTOYUKI SHIBATA translates American literature and runs the Japanese literary journal MONKEY. He has translated Paul Auster, Rebecca Brown, Stuart Dybek, Steve Erickson, Brian Evenson, Laird Hunt, Kelly Link, Steven Millhauser, and Richard Powers, among others. His translation of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a bestseller in Japan in 2018. His recent translations include Eric McCormack's Cloud and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. He is professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo.