On the phone my mother-in-law tells me a snow monkey has arrived in the neighborhood. The municipality advised all households to keep their windows closed, reminding everyone that in Japan snow monkeys are known to target lonely old women. Unfazed, my mother-in-law spends her days watching the snow monkey jump from roof to roof and hit the parked SUVs with bamboo branches. The other day, it stole some potatoes from her garden and threw them at the kids on their way home from school. At first the kids laughed, then screamed, but the monkey screamed louder, and so did my mother-in-law, all their faces as red as umeboshi. It was like a heavy rain of grief, clearing the air of the dust people never notice. After the potato incident, my mother-in-law says she has stopped following the instructions and leaves her bedroom window open every night. When I ask her why, isn’t that dangerous, she says that this way she can hear the snow monkey sleeping on her roof—its loud snoring startling her awake in the middle of the night. It’s what she missed the most: waking up to a living sound.
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Gessica Sakamoto Martini’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net and appears in DMQ Review, HAD, Verse Daily, MudRoom, South Florida Poetry Journal (SoFloPoJo), Hex Literary, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Durham University (UK) and is the editor-in-chief of Orion’s Belt magazine.