June 8th & 15th, 2020 - Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey

Dear TNY,

The famed fiction issue, eh?  I’m two stories in, having just finished “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey”, and it seems like your usual schtick:  publish work by well-known authors, regardless of quality.

What can be said about this story?  It’s too long because it’s padded with MC musings that are distracting and meaningless.  It’s interesting as a premise, both the monkey and name stealing, but it doesn’t really have any payoff.  It’s a unique way to talk about love, but the flipside is that it’s apparent that the author was trying to do that and used the whole story to set up the place for that.  Mostly, I think the author said it best:

It’s just about an old monkey who speaks human language, who scrubs guests’ backs in the hot springs in a tiny town in Gunma Prefecture, who enjoys cold beer, falls in love with human women, and steals their names.

So, TNY, armed with that information which was contained in the story, why would you publish it?  Ah, the dollar signs held by the author’s name. 

Yep, just another fiction issue from TNY.  Same lame time.  Same lame channel.

Nick