The literary journal Monkey Business unveils its seventh annual issue this month, with a launch tour in Boston and New York, bringing innovative writing from Japan to a U.S. publishing landscape that has comparatively little space for translated literature.
Founded in 2011 by editors Motoyuki Shibata and Ted Goossen, the magazine got its start as the English-language counterpart to Shibata's Japanese journal of the same name. The international version has made headway abroad with contributing works from luminaries — such as Haruki Murakami, Yoko Ogawa, Hideo Furukawa — published in translation alongside avant-garde authors who write in English.
Goossen, a university professor in Toronto and a translator of Japanese literature including novels by Murakami, said that fiction from Japan can offer "a different way of looking at the world."