Yu’s The Monkey and the Monk (2006)
The real translation, at a fifth of the length.
You can have the scholarship without the season — the same translator, choosing which chapters carry the whole.
You want Yu's translation and Yu's scholarship, and you have looked at the four-volume set and been honest with yourself.
What it keeps and what it changes
Keeps: Yu’s translation and his framing of what the novel is arguing about, in the chapters he judged load-bearing.
Changes: the length, and the completeness. The book’s own subtitle is “An Abridgment of The Journey to the West”; it does not hide what it is.
Whose story is it?
the pilgrimage’s, compressed — the monk survives the cut with more of his character intact than most retellings leave him.
How much time does it ask?
528 pages.
University of Chicago Press, 528 pages — Yu’s own abridgment of his four-volume translation.
Where to find it
Buy the paperback — Bookshop.org
Other ways to get it: Paperback — Amazon · Ebook — Kobo · Kindle — Amazon
Borrow it free: Borrow on Libby · Find at your library — WorldCat
More ways west: The Anthony C. Yu Translation, revised (2012) · Julia Lovell’s Monkey King (2021) · Arthur Waley’s Monkey (Grove Press, 1958)