About this Event
Seattle writer Rebecca Brown sits down with Japanese authors Hideo Furukawa and Tomoka Shibasaki to discuss MONKEY New Writing from Japan. They are joined by contributing editor Roland Kelts and MONKEY founder Motoyuki Shibata. is the English-language offspring of Tokyo based Japanese literary journal MONKEY.
Various volumes of MONKEY and other books by the featured speakers will be available for purchase at the event.
MONKEY Vol 6: Horror
Vol. 6 of MONKEY is 176 pages of full color, featuring the best of contemporary Japanese literature and new translations of modern classics. The pieces in this volume introduce contemporary Japanese Horror, from M**der in a cat café to a ghoulish deal with evil spirits, and from uncanny traces of a corporate ghost to unsettling encounters, dangerous transformations, and more!
Rebecca Brown is the author of 16 books (novels, short stories, essays, prose poems), most recently My Animal Kingdom and Obscure Destinies. Other titles include The Gifts of the Body and You Tell the Stories You Need to Believe. She has also written a play, the libretto for a dance opera, a one-woman show (“Monstrous”) commissioned by Northwest Film Forum, and arts and book criticism for the Stranger and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into Japanese, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Italian, and more. She was the designer, co-founder and first curator of the Jack Straw Writers program, and is a former Artistic Director of the Port Townsend Writers conference.
Hideo Furukawa is one of the most innovative writers in Japan today. His novel Belka, Why Don’t You Bark? was translated by Michael Emmerich; his partly fictional reportage Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure: A Tale That Begins with Fukushima was translated by Doug Slaymaker with Akiko Takenaka; and his short novel Slow Boat was translated by David Boyd. He has received the Noma New Face Prize, Mystery Writers of Japan Award, the Japan SF Grand Prize, and the Yukio Mishima Award. After translating the medieval classic The Tale of the Heike into modern Japanese, he published The Tale of the Heike: The Inu-Oh Chapters in 2017. Inu-Oh, the animated musical film based on the novel, directed by Masaaki Yuasa, won the Golden Globe for best Animated Feature Film in 2023 at the Venice Film Festival. The English translation by Kendall Heitzman will be published under the Monkey imprint in 2027.
Tomoka Shibasaki is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She published her debut in 2000 when she was 27; it was adapted by Isao Yukisada and released as a film in 2004 (A Day on the Planet). Her 2007 novel Sono machi no ima wa (That Town Today) was awarded the Geijutsu Sensho Newcomers Prize, the Sakunosuke Oda Award, and the Sakuya Konohana Award. In 2010, her novel Asako I & II received the Noma New Face Prize; it was adapted for film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and screened at Cannes. Shibasaki won the Akutagawa Prize in 2014 for Spring Garden, translated into English by Polly Barton. Her groundbreaking short story collection A Hundred Years and a Day, also translated by Polly Barton, was published under the Monkey imprint with Stone Bridge Press in 2025. In 2026 Shibasaki won the Yomiuri Literary Prize for her 2025 novel Kaerenai Tantei (The Detective Who Couldn’t Go Home). In 2010, her novel Awake or Asleep received the Noma New Face Prize; it was adapted into the film Asako I & II by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and screened at Cannes.
Roland Nozomu Kelts is a contributing editor to MONKEY New Writing from Japan. An award-winning journalist and the author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the US and The Art of Blade Runner: Black Lotus, he writes for publications in the US, Japan, and Europe, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, among others, and has contributed to several book-length collections. He was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University and teaches part-time at Waseda University in Tokyo. He is currently filming a documentary about manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka.
Motoyuki Shibata translates American literature and runs the Japanese literary journal MONKEY and its offspring, MONKEY New Writing from Japan. He has translated Paul Auster, Rebecca Brown, Stuart Dybek, Brian Evenson, Laird Hunt, Kelly Link, and Steven Millhauser, among many others. Recent translations include Paul Auster’s 4321, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll. He is professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, United States
USD 0.00
