New Essay by Murakami Out Now

MONKEY magazine has just published an essay by Haruki Murakami.

A new essay by Haruki Murakami has just been published thanks to the excellent MONKEY magazine.

MONKEY is relatively new as an English-language publication (starting in 2020) but it functioned for years in Japan as a literary journal run by Motoyuki Shibata. As of today, it has published 5 issues of its English-language version, which presents Japanese literature in translation. It is a colour publication filled with beautiful illustrations as well as excellent writing.

MONKEY Vol. 5 has an incredible line-up but of course my eye was caught first by the name Haruki Murakami, who has contributed an essay. He has written an essay called “Remembering Seiji Ozawa.” This is a short piece about his various meetings with the famous conductor, who passed away earlier this year. Murakami (who often writes about music in his books) says this about Ozawa’s strange gift for running an orchestra:

I never tired of watching this process. With each screw he tightened, strangely, the music became slightly freer and more open. This impressed me no end. How was such a thing possible? It should have made the performance stiffer—wasn’t that how things worked? Yet Seiji’s patient approach had a relaxing effect. The more he tightened, the smoother and more natural the music became, the more expressive and free. He breathed life into the notes. That skill, I believe, is at the core of the “Ozawa magic.”

He also says that Ozawa did his best work in the predawn hours, something he felt linked them both. Murakami also likes to get up early and write. “It is a bit presumptuous to compare myself with him,” he writes, but indeed one sees the similarities.

Oddly, this essay has nothing to do with the theme of MONKEY Vol 5, which is “creatures.” A description on the website says:

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!

For a more animal-themed Murakami essay, consider reading “Abandoning a Cat,” which appeared in the New Yorker a few years ago.)

Whilst I am excited about any new novel, story, or essay by Haruki Murakami, my love of Japanese literature goes much further and I can’t wait to read the other work in MONKEY VOL. 5. (I have downloaded it but will keep it for the weekend. I have so far only read the Murakami piece.) There is something by Hiromi Kawakami, for example. She wrote Strange Weather in Tokyo. Kikuko Tsumura also has something in this issue. She wrote the fantastic No Such Thing As An Easy Job, which I reviewed here. Translators Ted Goossen and Jay Rubin also have contributions. (They have both translated Murakami and Goossen edits MONKEY. I also highly recommend Rubin’s book about translating Murakami.)

You can order MONKEY Vol. 5 here. Living in Cambodia, I will unfortunately have to go with a digital version but there are paperback copies available to those with more reliable shipping addresses.

On December 3, MONKEY will host a free launch party hosted on Zoom. You can sign up for it here. It is titled “Japan’s Literary Boom!”