Monkeys

The Monkeys are urban animals pushed into hiding by a city that leaves them few places to live and treats them as nuisances or targets. In the story, one monkey’s underground refuge becomes the answer to a mystery about stolen names; once caught, he explains his circumstances and is offered a chance to begin again away from Tokyo.

Urban Life and the Sewer Hideout

The monkey describes a city with few trees and few shady places where monkeys can rest during the day. Aboveground, people gang up on them and try to catch them; children throw things or shoot at them with BB guns, and large dogs chase them. Even taking shelter in a tree offers little peace, since television crews may arrive and shine spotlights at them. With nowhere to rest safely, the monkey says, the group has to hide underground.

The captured monkey had made a hideout in a sewer beneath Takanawa, using it as a base for foraging across Tokyo. His underground life is therefore both a practical response to harassment and part of the city’s hidden geography: the sewers shelter an animal excluded from ordinary urban space.

The Name-Theft Mystery

Mrs. Sakaki explains that listening to Mizuki over two months gradually clarified the pattern for her. She concluded that something was stealing names and, because it had to be hiding underground in the neighborhood, narrowed the possibilities to the subway or the sewers. She told her husband she suspected a nonhuman creature was living in the sewers and asked him to investigate; the search turned up the monkey.

The solution depends on Mrs. Sakaki’s unusual powers, which her husband says he has witnessed during their twenty-two years of marriage. He had supported the opening of her counseling center at the Shinagawa Ward Office because he believed residents would benefit if she had a place to use those abilities. Finding the monkey relieves him, but the explanation also makes the capture more than a matter of routine enforcement: attentive listening has connected Mizuki’s account to the hidden animal’s presence.

Promise of Release

Mizuki asks Mr. Sakaki to hear the monkey’s account before deciding what to do, arguing that he is not evil by nature and has already suffered. She proposes releasing him in the mountains, perhaps Mount Takao, on the condition that he not return to Tokyo. Mr. Sakaki agrees, and the monkey meekly promises not to come back within the city limits or wander the sewers again. He says that he is no longer young and sees release as a chance for a fresh start.

Sakurada proposes branding the monkey with Shinagawa Ward’s official seal so he can be recognized if he returns. The monkey pleads against it: a strange mark on his buttocks, he fears, would keep the other monkeys from accepting him. He offers to tell them anything they want to know if they abandon the branding. Mr. Sakaki drops the idea, partly noting that the ward would have to take responsibility for an official brand; Sakurada accepts this reluctantly. The exchange leaves the monkey’s fate framed not as simple punishment but as a conditional return to a life among his own kind.

Narrative Significance

The monkey’s testimony gives the animals an independent voice: they are not merely clues in the name-theft mystery, but inhabitants describing the pressures of human urban life in their own terms. His refuge is criminalized as a suspicious hideout, yet his account makes clear that the city’s aboveground spaces are dangerous to him. The proposed release, and his fear of being marked and rejected by other monkeys, shifts attention from capture to the possibility of belonging beyond the city’s boundaries.