Maybe you’ve heard that travel to Japan is booming. This is thanks in no small part to the advantageous exchange rate of the US dollar to the yen, reaching exchange rates not seen since the 1980s. The result: unusually affordable travel in a country as affluent as Japan. How has this happened?

This is a follow up to my last post describing the content and context of Journey to the West. Frederik H. Green is professor of Chinese at San Francisco State University and the translator of Bird Talk and Other Stories, a collection of stories by the Chinese author Xu Xu. We sat down to talk about the historical background of the Journey and how readers can approach the novel in translation today.