  The Pierre Auger Collaboration (Auger) recently reported a correlation
between the arrival directions of cosmic rays with energies above 39 EeV and
the flux pattern of 23 nearby starburst galaxies (SBGs). In this Letter, we
tested the same hypothesis using cosmic rays detected by the Telescope Array
experiment (TA) in the 9-year period from May 2008 to May 2017. Unlike the
Auger analysis, we did not optimize the parameter values but kept them fixed to
the best-fit values found by Auger, namely 9.7% for the anisotropic fraction of
cosmic rays assumed to originate from the SBGs in the list and 12.9{\deg} for
the angular scale of the correlations. The energy threshold we adopted is 43
EeV, corresponding to 39 EeV in Auger when taking into account the energy-scale
difference between two experiments. We find that the TA data is compatible with
isotropy to within 1.1{\sigma} and with the Auger result to within 1.4{\sigma},
meaning that it is not capable to discriminate between these two hypotheses.
