Vince had never seen a snow monkey before he wrote the bookin 1997, but after the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics featured these amazing little creatures living in a hot spring right next to their ski area, he knew that this was his monkey. To this day, Vince finds it hard to believe that he wrote an obviously fictional story about light brown monkeys, little boy-like in size, living in a hot spring at a ski area only to discover actual light brown monkeys, little boy-like in size living in a hot spring at a ski area! Go figure!

The Japanese Macaque (Macaca fuscata) is a monkey species native to northern Japan, and is the most northern-living non-human primate, surviving winter temperatures of below -15 °C. They have brown-gray fur, a red face, hands and bottom, and a short tail - and often seem remarkably human like. In the wild they spend most of their time in forests and feed on seeds, buds, fruit, invertebrates, berries, leaves, and bark. The monkeys have a body length ranging from 80 to 95 cm. The males weigh around 10-14 kg while the females are usually around 5.5 kg.

The hot spring where the snow monkeys live is actually a park that was built especially for them. The park is located in the Yokoyu River valley, which flows down from Shiga Kogen. At an elevation of 850 meters, the area is called Jigokudani ("Hell's Valley") due to the steep cliffs and hot water steaming out from the earth's surface. It's also a fairly harsh environment in winter with snow on the ground for a third of the year, but it is also a paradise for the couple of hundred monkeys that live there.

To find out more about these amazing monkeys check out this web site: http://www.snowjapan.com/e/features/snow-monkeys-of-jigokudani.html

To see a great little video of these monkeys at play check out this web site: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZtVlpYSDmI