Monkey Service

Stephane. It has to start somewhere so let’s start with him. Stephane was a bureaucrat in his forties who lived with his parents on the outskirts of Paris and worked as a clerk in the French Ministry of Agriculture. Stephane took great pride in his Frenchness and expressed it by insisting that things done in a French way were more natural than things done elsewhere.

Things Stephane deemed unnatural included waking up very early, eating small portions, sitting on the floor, and not drinking wine. We knew this because each time one of these occurred Stephane would turn to the nearest witness and exclaim, “But this—this is unnatural!” On a remote rice farm in the far north of Japan, he found much to be unnatural.

We had descended on this place from around the world as agricultural volunteers, drawn by a post on an internet bulletin board that billed the experience as an international workcamp where we would further world peace by helping with the daily operations of a humble organic family farm. A noble cause.

In truth, we had come to do one thing and we all knew it from the start: shoot bottle rockets at monkeys, who had taken a shine to using the farm’s rice fields as a toilet. This meant something less like nobility and more like waking up before the sun to stake out a perimeter and spritz it with the perfume of violent intent. On the ridgeline there was a shack filled with lawn chairs and fireworks, plus cans of milk coffee; every few days the head farmer (age 87) zipped out on his Yamaha scooter to restock.

The main part of our job wasn’t hard: be larger than the monkeys, inform them of our dominion by winning the game of sheer mass. This we had done for a million years and could continue to do without thought or effort. The bottle rockets, for their part, would extend our reach. We needed the advantage; in the fog of the early hour we certainly wouldn’t have been able to outsmart even our own kind. The rice fields were wedged between the mountains and the coast and each morning we sat stupefied, watching neon pink spill like shimmering paint over the Sea of Japan as the sun rose up behind us.

At daybreak the monkeys would coordinate their first foray. Dumb and drowsy, we humans each sat armed with a lighter in one hand and a clutch of bottle rockets in the other. The monkeys would chatter through the veil where the forest met the fields as they tried to ascertain our motives for taking up their space. From time to time we’d see a blur of motion. We could feel their presence only yards away but they were too stealthy for us to grasp with any sense other than our intuition, which had been civilized into bluntness, fuzzy as an AM radio searching in vain for the Hostile Primate Channel.

No, artificial strength, strength through firepower, would be our only hope — especially in the case of whoever got assigned to patrol with Hiroshi, our leader, who had organized this entire project so that he would look good on college applications, who spent every shift leaning so far back in his lawn chair that he formed his own shelf, reading a self-help book called Maximize Your Ego in the milky morning light.

The point was not actually to fight the monkeys. Legally, we couldn’t (UNESCO). The aim was political: to persuade them that even if they could sneak past our lines into the soft and luxurious rice field where they wanted to poop (their goal), that instead they would prefer to choose someplace more hospitable, perhaps quieter, for their business. Our bottle rockets were instruments through which we would conduct sonic diplomacy. The scream of the weapons must have sounded French because Stephane found it delightful.

In exchange for our month of monkey service, the rice farmers, who were grateful for the reprieve—normally they had to wage this war alone—arranged for us to have certain amenities. Among them was the abandoned police station where we cooked and slept, which in reality was just a modest house in the middle of the seaside village with a few pieces of furniture and an empty file cabinet; it had probably once been marketed to the prefecture’s police as an abandoned country home. Next to the file cabinet, we’d been left a 50-kilo sack of rice and several cases of pumpkins. This was our food supply for the month. Curious neighbors took pity and brought unripe nashi—round Asian pears, still hard as cannonballs—but even the good intentions of charity couldn’t keep our dinner routine from becoming unbearable.

Each evening began with promise. We would pile into the team van and drive to a geothermal bath complex on the beach. Locals sat naked and unfazed in searing-hot pools cantilevered high over the sand. We joined them, boiling ourselves red and carefree while watching the sun return to the sea. Back at the house, things invariably went downhill. We would eat nashi first. Then rice. By night, the pumpkin came. At the end of week one, we were losing our minds. The hot water started making us even edgier.

Our fortunes turned when a vision struck the nineteen-year-old Kyoto University marine biology student among us. Forever clad in a t-shirt emblazoned with the motto DASHING STRIDE, Yuki exuded confidence at any speed. Idea: what if we gathered fallen bamboo from the forest and made our own fishing poles? In a dusty corner of the file cabinet he found hooks, line, and little bait cages. We tied it all together with the knots kindergarteners would make and headed down to the village pier.

An octopus hunter balancing on the rocks acknowledged our arrival with a graceful tilt of his spear. We clomped to the end of the concrete and tried our luck with the bamboo poles. Our luck was bad. We went home for pumpkin.

The next day two local women in technical raingear came down to the water to watch us and laugh. One disappeared and returned with a 12-foot matte black rod as thin as a mosquito’s proboscis. Her face was cheerful, chatting lightly with Yuki, while her hands clacked along the line, locking bait to hooks with the speed of a machine. She wheeled back, drew a deep breath and cast so far and so fast that it whistled straight into the sun. She and her companion pulled in armfuls of fish and filleted them on the bloody concrete. They passed us bits of sashimi on the knife blade. Their husbands sat on shore and sipped tea.

Yuki knew the name of every fish and nodded in awe as they filled the cooler. Friendship blossomed. When we opened our door in the dark the next morning we found a pile of loaner equipment on our step. In that moment our luck on the water transformed.

Now we were catching a grab bag of little fishes every afternoon, each not much bigger than a wallet but substantial enough to keep, plus the occasional pufferfish (“FUGU!” Yuki would yell, before flinging it back to sea like a hot grenade). Later at the house we would fry them whole and if it was raining Hiroshi would play California Dreamin’, stare out the window, and write love letters to a list of potential girlfriends whose mailing addresses he’d bought in Tokyo.

The sudden addition of nightly protein lifted everyone’s spirits. Our pumpkin-based diet started feeling humane. Hiroshi’s letter collection grew. A reporter from the Yomiuri Shimbun came out to do a story on us one afternoon but when we couldn’t stage any action photos with the fireworks and the monkeys (on siesta, presumably) the piece was killed.

As our work and meals settled into a comfortable rhythm, the rest of our time became freer and we found ourselves with spare hours to spend. One quiet Friday we applied ourselves to helping some locals clear overgrown forest paths in preparation for the weekend’s Samurai Festival. From our outsiders’ perspective the Samurai Festival looked like not much more than an easy group hike for villagers eager to socialize; the remarkable thing was the lavish seafood feast they’d planned for its finale. When Stephane saw the crab legs roll by, his eyes nearly popped out of his head.

Back at the house it was a night like any other: after a bath on the beach and our fish-and-pumpkin rations we unfurled our futons side by side on the tatami mat floor of the former detective’s office and went to sleep. Stephane, overheated in his cotton sheets and underwear, tossed and turned and murmured through the night. Over a breakfast of plain rice the next morning he declared: this way of life, whatever we were doing, was unnatural. The sight of crab from Hokkaido had stirred him. We needed to pool our resources. We needed to buy better food.

Between the eight of us there wasn’t much money but we agreed we had enough to risk a single trip to the village convenience store as long as it wasn’t a blowout. We could dress up our simple fish fries a bit, maybe take a night off from the orange stuff. We all still needed train fare back to Tokyo and overspending on groceries could mean getting stranded on the rice farm, eating pumpkin forever. We steeled our resolve and went shopping.

We had barely set foot in the tiny aisles when Stephane started spinning from product to product, disassociating into pure transcendent joy. There was beer! There was bread! We stood stunned as he lost control, filling his basket with curry packets, chips, ice cream bars and more. He ran to the register and pulled a secret stash of cash from his pants. He paid alone, then sprinted for the van.

On the ride home, as the smooth highway lulled him from his fugue state back to a calm baseline, we asked about his haul. He wasn’t even sure what he’d bought. Like half of us, he could comprehend no more than a handful of words in Japanese, none in writing. He’d grabbed things because of the pictures on the wrappers.

“But I cannot believe it!” he cried, as if from a dream. “A moutarde. Here, impossible! A moutarde naturelle! A true French moutarde, in this place, this place…” He gestured to the ink-black darkness beyond the van’s windows. His eyes were glassy, drunk on his miraculous good fortune and all the future meals it would grace, as he dug into his bag, smiling so wide it had to hurt, and proudly revealed to us his very own bright yellow squeeze bottle of French’s Classic Mustard.


Hachimori, Akita Prefecture, Japan
2002 / 2024
Adrienne Anderson