A PERFECT DAY FOR BANANAFISH STORY PDF PDF
This translation appeared in the second issue of Monkey Business, which came out as a paperback in 2012, while you can read a more traditional type of story by the same author, “Dream of Love, Etc.,” in the third issue, which is also available in ePub, PDF and Kindle.
We could go on and on about how this shows how well American literature is read in Japan, and how much affinity there is between words and music in contemporary Japanese fiction, but more than anything else we think “A Once-Perfect Day for Bananafish” is a great read, which requires no knowledge of Salinger’s original to be enjoyed.
Mieko is a wonderful singer-songwriter as well as one of Japan’s major novelists, and we can hear the beautiful cadence of her poetry in Hitomi Yoshio’s great translation. We love the idea of the three-year-old Sybil Carpenter in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” as an old woman at the end of her life, with the memory of that strange young man, Seymour Glass, flickering in and out of her consciousness. (Some time before, Mieko had contributed a beautiful essay in memory of Kurt Vonnegut to Hayakawa’s SF Magazine.) Yet when she submitted this terrific prose poem, “A Once-Perfect Day for Bananafish,” based on what is arguably Salinger’s very best short story - we were blown away. We expected it would turn out to be a nice homage to the beloved writer. Salinger died, we thought it would be wonderful to feature a poem or story about him or his work by Mieko Kawakami - who had once told us of her fondness for Salinger’s Nine Stories - in the Japanese version of Monkey Business. Thus Naoyuki Ii discusses the “office literature” of Keita Genji, Franz Kafka and Herman Melville in issues two and three, while the third issue also features EnJoe Toh’s take on a hilarious tale about a troupe of desperate actors on the lam penned by Japan’s leading modernist, Riichi Yokomitsu. Monkey Business is a literary journal that aims to introduce English-speaking readers to what’s going on in the contemporary Japanese literary scene, but we also try to establish a dialogue between old and new fiction whenever we can, on occasion asking authors to select their favorite classic and write an essay about it. Recommended by Ted Goossen & Motoyuki Shibata
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