(That may be an additional appeal of the gym: in a precarious world, a weight lifter looks exactly like what she is.) In The Women, a citys female population contracts a virus that turns them into homicidal hotties. I followed, but never having been very good at walking throughcrowds, I kept barging into peoples shoulders, and by the time I caught up, she had already joined the line for the steak bento. These pastiches, parodies, and hauntings are all brilliantly translatedwith all their uncanny intactby Asa Yoneda. Although the stories are often funny, theyre not sarcastic or ironic, and Motoyas not really kidding. I fled from thetinkling of coins falling and the suckling sound of him chewingon dried squid. [12][13] Motoya subsequently won the 7th Kenzaburo Oe Prize for her 2012 collection Arashi no pikunikku (Picnic in the Storm),[14] and the 27th Mishima Yukio Prize for her 2013 novel Jibun wo suki ni naru houhou. Motoya is restless among the halls of convention; she appreciates the classic elements of short stories, but is eager to deface them with a brightly colored Sharpie. In her stories alienation is less a threat than a feature of contemporary life. Idplanned to just wait for her, but I saw a banner for the SpecialSelection Four-Eel Taste Test Bento and was tempted into gettingone. Is that the problem? I asked. My husband seemed anxious to make a snake ball with me. As a leashed man miserably admits, just before being yanked to mortal combat, This is all because of the desires of men like us. Such a desire, for a more exciting lover, has exciting effects: the women demand duels, then take their husbands and boyfriends down by the river to kill them. There was no response. [25] A film adaptation of Ranb to taiki (Vengeance Can Wait), directed by Masanori Tominaga and starring Tadanobu Asano, Minami Hinase, and Eiko Koike, premiered in Japan the next year. Take whatever form you want to be! The distending body of my husband exploded with a loud pop. The Lake Hamana eel was firmer and more succulent than the one from the Mikawa region. The unsettling stories in The Lonesome Bodybuilder are deeply preoccupied with the yawning disconnect between people. On The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy, Peter Campion Tomokos animosity toward her straw husband is as brief as it is startling. This normalization gives the stories their irony and their sense of being just a bit off, like a lingering scent of formaldehyde. () Motoyas talent for voice informs her first-person narrators, both female and male, who have a genuine vulnerability and convincing matter-of-factness as they veer into the fantastic." At their very heart, however, are everyday struggles that are not only typical in contemporary Japanese society, but identifiable around the world" -. Motoya's stories tend to include a few odd details and features -- often contrasting with the seeming normality of the narration, a mix of the absurd and matter-of-fact mundane. The mass movement of a migrating flock of . On Places Ive Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown, Art Edwards It also indicates the range of Motoyas storytelling style by unveiling additional powers of suggestion and atmospheric description. Uwano again? I was feigning calm, but my voice came outhigher than normal. 2023 Cond Nast. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. I remembered that once, many years ago, Id asked Santa Claus for a present: to wake up and have the whole world to myself, she recalls as she wanders the ghost town. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. Other nuances arrive in Paprika Jiro, a story that conveys a fondness for mercantile traditions. But in a world that both values men and teaches men to value themselves so much more highly than their partners, any partnership seems doomed to disappoint. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. The executive who holds her tongue at the meeting also sees, or dreams that she sees, faces in inanimate objects; she suffers from a condition called pareidolia, in which the mind perceives illusory patterns in random stimuli. The narrator, reasoning that she must be lonely, what with her entire family having been killed by an evil gang, asks her out, only to find that his new girlfriend is psychotic and in love with her dad. One of the collections most active narrators is the curmudgeonly craftswoman at the center of The Dogs, the penultimate story. Her varied work has resulted in numerous accolades, and, most recently, the release of The Lonesome Bodybuilder, the first book-length English translation of her fiction. . When I served him the peeled pear segments on a plate, thehusband-like creature excitedly reached for a cocktail stick. [9][11] Though Nurui doku did not win the Akutagawa Prize, it won the 33rd Noma Literary New Face Prize. The tales in The Lonesome Bodybuilder boil down to the problem of balancing empathy with self-assertion, all while the people around you are behaving like wraiths or aliens. 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Yukiko Motoya's The Lonesome Bodybuilder is a refreshing reminder that fiction is an elastic medium, capable of stretching into new and surprising shapes. He says his ex-wifes been sending him strange garbled emails recently, I said. I finished towel-dryingmy hair and stepped out onto the balcony to bring in the laundryId hung out that afternoon. Then you can buy even more land.. And they eat and they eat at exactly the same speed, until theyre just two heads making a ball, and then they both get eaten up and disappear. New York, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2018. Where does Motoya find lines like When I woke up and looked in the mirror, I saw that my face had finally begun to forget who I was? I think?. At face value, the stories are fun and funny to read, but weightier questions lurk below the surface. [3][4] She founded her own theater company, called Gekidan Motoyo Yukiko (Motoya Yukiko Theater Company), in 2000, and began writing and staging her own plays. Her husbands jealousy is another form of misperception. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. Nov. 2018. Most of the central characters are female, with many of the stories strongly influenced by the relationships -- both intimate and more casual and distant -- they are involved in. These two stories stand out from the others, which, at times, are held back by traces of redundancy or ideas that are almost excessively legible. He's a founding member of Literary Starbucks (2016) and a recovering poetry editor with a chronic crush on nouns that get used as adjectives. By now, I was like the ghost of a snakethat had already been eaten up by many other snakes, and Id lostmy own body long before getting swallowed up by my husband. There is something pareidolic about the writing process. The climate crisis demands a form of literary expression that lifts it out of the realm of intellectual knowing and lodges it deep in readers bodies. The women in these stories find themselves with bad mennot malicious or violent, but complacent, uninteresting, and undeserving of their partners. [1] As a child she read mystery stories by Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edogawa Ranpo, as well as horror manga. When I thought about whether the thing that had started tomove on top of me was my husband or just something like him, Ifelt a terrible dread and kept my eyes firmly shut. One night, after dinner, I was surprised to notice my husband engrossedin his iPad rather than the variety show playing on the TV. I have the feeling I would have met a version of myself I dont know now? Coins.. Her husband, who bears the brunt of these jabs, deserves it all (and more). Yukiko Motoya aims her leveling gaze at sexism in contemporary Japanese society, reserving her strangest fates for men who underestimate the women in their lives. Soft Skull Press. Used with permission of Soft Skull Press. With frank sincerity, Motoya makes the exhausted clichs of marriage and intimacy literal, and thus, energetically strange. The Lonesome Bodybuilder (published as Picnic in the Storm in the UK ) collects eleven stories -- though one, the Akutagawa Prize-winning novella, 'An Exotic Marriage', is considerably longer than the rest, taking up more than a third of the book by itself. Each time I looked at my husband lying on the couch, I had the strange impression I was living with a new kind of organism that would die if it exerted itself in any way. As the strangeness mounts, San observes her identity as something willed and imposed. Or: Weeping, I swung at her head with a club Id taken off a man Id kicked to the ground? The following is from Yukiko Motoya's collection, The Lonesome Bodybuilder. The Lonesome Bodybuilder is made up of 10 short stories, some barely three or four pages long, and a novella, "An Exotic Marriage". [10] Motoya's 2009 novel Ano ko no kangaeru koto wa hen (That Girl's Got Some Strange Ideas) was nominated for the 141st Akutagawa Prize. His misperception becomes literal: he cant grasp whats right in front of him. New York, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2018. Exploring the struggle against alienation isnt new ground to tread in literature. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. [5] It became the title story of a 2003 collection published by Kodansha. [16] At the prize ceremony the press commented on her mismatched socks, leading Motoya to admit that she had not expected to win, and had rushed to the prize ceremony without any special preparation. While not explicitly feminist, her female protagonists share a capacity for small rebellions, sudden twitches against life-long habits of conformity. On If by Song by Marcia Karp, Brian Chander Wiora Her books have been published or are forthcoming in French, Norwegian, Spanish, and Chinese, . How History Claims Us: On Made to Explode by Sandra Beasley, Aumaine Rose Smith Tortured partnerships are a favorite target for the award-winning Japanese novelist and playwright, whose work has been published in English in literary magazines such as Granta, Tender, and Catapult. But what was soappealing about the insipid map that looked like a stage backdropand its ever-twinkling coins? Every time I got together with someone new, I got replanted, and the nutrients from the old soil disappeared without a trace. Her novel Funuke domo kanashimi no ai o misero (Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers!) Anyone can read what you share. All rights reserved. On The Curious Thing by Sandra Lim, Diana Whitney In 'Typhoon' people take flight with their umbrellas in a great storm -- so many that eventually the narrator finds: "as I scanned the sky, I spotted loads of tiny human figures floating among the dark clouds". Motoyas eerie touches allow the characters to embrace inconvenient and irrational parts of themselves; at moments when self-doubt is making them flounder, these otherworldly intrusions act as a corrective force. [30], In 2013 Motoya married the poet, lyricist and film director Kite Okachimachi. On Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing by Julie Marie Wade, Matt McBride Her books have been published or are forthcoming in French, Norwegian, Spanish, and Chinese, . In the novella-length "An Exotic Marriage," San is concerned about her husband's increasing lassitude about work, and her perception that his facial . It settled to the floor in countless small clumps. Freed, he turns into a mountain peony. The narrator of An Exotic Marriage notices that she and her husband are beginning to look alike, but her husbands investment in game shows is the greater threat to her happiness and autonomy. This criticism becomes pointed when juxtaposed with the final story in the collection, The Straw Husband, about a newlywed woman named Tomoko who is unfailingly devoted to her husband, a man made of straw. 209 pages. In another, a man sees his girlfriends lips begin to bleed a lipstick hue he has fantasized about her wearing. There are two snakes, and they each start cannibalizing the other ones tail. Perhaps its greatest gifts are its aesthetic solutions, whichthough at most tangential to successful western narrativesoften feel like deep breathsconstructed benisons where a reader can get out from under the storm. Yukiko Motoyas The Lonesome Bodybuilder is available from Soft Skull Press. Asa Yoneda, This page was last edited on 18 November 2022, at 09:31. Touch one and see, he said, so I tried pressing on a browndisc with my finger. So, for example, in the (US-)title story the narrator is inspired to take up bodybuilding, sculpting her body through intense exercise, after catching a boxing match her husband was watching on TV. Fun and funny . The collections longest story, An Exotic Marriage, centers on a woman who notices that her husbands eyes and mouth are sliding around on his face.