Monkey Business

My parents departed, and left behind a stack of magazines.

I just read Haruki Murakami`s A Shinagawa Monkey in the New Yorker, a fable about a monkey that steals people`s names. It reminded me that our own neighborhood in central Tokyo had a monkey, too.

We lived near a park in a hollow with a big clump of mature trees, and the monkey made several appearances there. We never saw him in the wild, but I knew people who did (and envied them, because of course I always looked for him). We heard that he used to swim sometimes in our elementary school`s pool. We also heard he was eventually captured and sent to a zoo.

I Googled this, and was happy to find some photos from 1999 on someone`s web site, of a crowd assembled to watch the monkey, as well as one of our neighbors offering him a banana.

I had heard various stories about what monkeys symbolized in Japan -- I remember someone saying that the sudden appearance of a monkey was never a good thing, because monkeys were something called marebito, spiritual beings sent by the gods to the human world, who brought misfortune to whatever village they visited. But I remember also hearing just the opposite, that they brought good fortune, too.

This Buddhist site told me more about monkeys in Japanese culture than I wanted to know.

Somehow, a monkey doesn`t seem out of place in that particular park. It`s the one that also had the Edo-era graveyard.

And who knows what else.