Monkey Business: A New Japan-based Literary Journal

Good news, everyone!

Actually, better than that: pretty awesome news.

The literary journal A Public Space is producing an American version of the Japanese literary journal Monkey Business which will highlight contemporary Japanese literature in English translation!

Holy shit! That's great!

[This is all via Three Percent, by the way.]

It's being edited and put together by Motoyuki Shibata, an English translator of contemporary authors like Thomas Pynchon and Paul Auster, and founder of the original Japanese journal Monkey Business, Ted Goosen, a Japanese translator, and Roland Kelts, author of Japanamerica.

And the selection looks amazing. Some highlights include:

Monsters, a short story by Hideo Furukawa (remember how we were talking about Belka, Why Don't You Bark last week?)
translated by Michael Emmerich

People from My Neighborhood: a collection of vignettes by Hiromi Kawakami (author of the recent Manazuru, which I should have a review of up on Three Percent in the next couple weeks)
translated by Ted Goossen

 The Tale of the House of Physics: a short story by Yoko Ogawa (author of The Housekeeper and the Professor and Hotel Iris)
translated by Ted Goossen

Pursuing “Growth”: an interview with Haruki Murakami by Hideo Furukawa (Oh how I want to read this...)
translated by Ted Goossen 

And tons more, including a lot of poetry, and a manga version of Kafka. You can see the whole table of contents at the A Public Space website.

Not only that, as far as I can tell, this isn't a one time thing. This is just the first issue—although it will only be coming out once a year.

Still, though, I'm extremely pumped. An entire literary journal devoted to Japanese literature? That will come out regularly? Yes and yes. You can order it here, like I already have.