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. On The Atmospherians by Alex McElroy, Asa Drake My mission is to stay as free and unfettered as possible. Yukiko Motoya so commented on her career and creative process during an interview for Granta. The Grandfather of New Nature Writing Was a Bird-Loving Poet. In the collections longest and scariest story, An Exotic Marriage, Motoya, through her narrator, lands a flurry of punches against the oppressive domesticity of marriage. She finds a trainer, and a good deal at a nearby fitness club (a rather unlikely "100 Free Sessions Until You See the Results You Want ! Eine Hausfrau wird zur Bodybuilderin, aber ihrem arbeitsschtigen Ehemann fallen die neuen Ikiteru dake de ai was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize,[9] and was later adapted into a 2018 film of the same name. Motoya was born in snowy Ishikawa Prefecture on the Sea of Japan but later set out for Tokyo, where she completed an acting course and worked as a voice actor for a spell before deciding to zero in on writing novels and plays. . One woman puts it to her husband directly: You can stop being husband shaped now! THE LONESOME BODYBUILDER By Yukiko Motoya Translated by Asa Yoneda 224 pp. 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. Each story begins unsuspectingly a clerk helps a woman in a changing room, a wife decides to go to the gym and, from these seemingly realistic setups, the magical and the surreal unfold. 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. On Memorial Drive: A Daughters Memoir by Natasha Trethewey, John Wall Barger Let the cat do it. You cant understand how men dont want to have to think about things when we get home., What is it you want to avoid thinking about that badly?. Readers who are familiar with Japanese folklore, manga, or anime will probably find some of the themes to be mundane - there is much reminiscent of Rumiko Takahashi in the more fantastic stories, like The Dogs or An Exotic Marriage. Sharlene Teos Ponti recently tracked the codependent relationship between two teens, while Neel Patels If You See Me, Dont Say Hi was a collection of short stories that doubled as a study of longing. I wanted to pretend I was asleep, but then he wentto switch on the light, so I reached out and caught his hand almostby reflex. MEDIA REVIEWS. Paper, $16.95. 224 pp. Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group. [1] As a child she read mystery stories by Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edogawa Ranpo, as well as horror manga. 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. 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. 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. Id brought her to the store, promising to buy her something new to wear, or anything else she wanted, but Hakone had headed straight for the escalator down to the basement food hall and asked for a bento. What are you doing on there? I peered over his shoulder. Soft Skull Press. "In Yukiko Motoya's delightful new story collection, the familiar becomes unfamiliar . . Characters change; literally, their facial features move, morph, disappear. Margaryta Golovchenko. Like the work of Aimee Bender and Robert Walser, many of these stories, however whimsical on the surface, possess a sense of dread at their core. The collections longest story, An Exotic Marriage, is more of a novella, and explores physical transformation as a metaphor for the shifting of identities in a relationship. $16.95. [8], Motoya's novel Ikiteru dake de ai (Love at Least), about an unemployed and apparently depressed woman's relationship with her boyfriend, was published in 2006 by Shinchosha. From Apocalypse to Apocalypso: On An Ecotopian Lexicon, Ryan Lackey Japanese novelist, playwright, and theatre director, "Yukiko Motoya takes a satirical look at the 'Super No-Flat', "Yusho Takiguchi, Yukiko Motoya share Akutagawa Prize while Bumpei Aoyama wins Naoki Prize", " ", "From violence to vulnerability, Yukiko Motaya enchants with 'The Lonesome Bodybuilder', "Yukiko Motoya's Surreal World of Alienated Characters", "Husbands and Wives Magically Morph in a Japanese Story Collection", "The Lonesome Bodybuilder: Stories by Yukiko Motoya tales of the unexpected", "Presenter Interview: The Playwright's Center of Minneapolis", "53rd Kishida Kunio Drama Award goes to Ryuta Horai and Yukiko Motoya in a double awarding", "Why I Can No Longer Look at a Picnic Blanket Without Laughing", "The Reason I Carry Biscuits to Offer to Young Boys", "Alexandra Kleeman recommends "The Lonesome Bodybuilder" by Yukiko Motoya", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yukiko_Motoya&oldid=1122580502, Short description is different from Wikidata, Pages using embedded infobox templates with the title parameter, Articles containing Japanese-language text, Articles with Japanese-language sources (ja), Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, 2006 10th Tsuruya Nanboku Drama Award, Best Play category. There was a tremor in my hand holding the paring knife. During your trial you will have complete digital access to FT.com with everything in both of our Standard Digital and Premium Digital packages. On The Nightfields by Joanna Klink, Patrick Davis Theres a Jungian undercurrent in Motoyas writing, which seems to prize self-actualization as a way to mendor endtroubled relationships. the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. But something else is at work, too: throughout the collection, and especially in stories like Typhoon, Straw Husband, and The Dogs. 209 pages. Paper, $16.95. Instead of responding, I looked down and nibbled a slice of pear. This is abundantly illustrated in An Exotic Marriage, a novella about a woman, San, who begins to fear that her husbands identity is blending with her own. No spam, we promise! How had I ended up married to a completely different species of being from me? San wonders to herself, before her features begin to mutate too. . cookies But I guess that cant be right. Maybe someone told it tome, a long time ago. The stories consider how it feels to take other people into account, to be forever calibrating your own words and actions in relation to those nearby. I think?. I sat down on the couch and looked at the iPad screen. The positioning of his features was deteriorating faster thanever. Lying on the couch, they prompt the strange impression of a new kind of organism that would die if it exerted itself in any way. There is acid in Motoyas surrealism: these women will put up with anything! Her books have . Lingerie? Back to the gym she goes. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. At other points, the couple are recast as ravenous snakes. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. The Aesthetics of Cosmic Feminism: A Review of Magda Crnecis FEM, Katherine M. Hedeen In The Women, the eponymous characters are transformed into blood-thirsty warriors through the escalating fantasies of their partners. She endures this at first but later partakes in it, finding herself pulled into her husbands orbithis daily consumption of variety shows and deep-fried food. Even when she poses in front of him in a micro bikini, her hair now short, her body filled out and covered in tanning oil, he asks: Whats that? The mass movement of a migrating flock of . Youknow, I think pears might be my favorite fruit, he announced. [15], In 2016, on her fourth nomination, Motoya won the 154th Akutagawa Prize for her story Irui konin tan (Tales of Marriage to a Different Sort), in which a wife discovers that she and her husband look more and more alike as they grow older together. They confront their stifled independence: velleities give way to keen yearnings, desires twist toward violence. university 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. (I want you to come out of that fitting room with a smile on your face! the attendant chirps, noting the slurping, roiling kind of sound emanating from behind the curtain.) New Worlds Forever Measured by the Old: On Burning Province by Michael Prior, Katherine M. Hedeen The writing itself is to be admired. "), and dedicates herself to it, with considerable success. Her husbands features are always shifting on his face, and soon he resembles, variously, a monster, a snake, a new creature, his wife, and then, finally, a mountain peony. But Motoya belongs more to modern oddness than to a fabulist tradition. Winner of the Kenzaburo Oe Prize, Picnic in the Storm is the English-language debut of one of Japan's most fearless young writers. (Several tales allude to Kwaidan, a ghoulish anthology compiled by the folklorist Lafcadio Hearn, in 1904.). Every time Inoticed myself acting as though that was who Id been all along,a chill went up my spine. The Dogs avoids such risks by dint of its elusiveness and subtlety. How She Learned to Love Herself in 2014; and Japan's most prestigious literary prize, the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. 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. Thats the image I have of marriagethat both me and the other person, as we are now, will disappear before we can do anything about it. The other persons ideas, interests, andhabits would gradually take the place of my own. Motoya likes her fiction to swerve, not drift or meander, and she doesnt have patience for wandering. 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. My husband looked up from the iPad for the first time in awhile, and what I saw nearly made me shriek and run from theroom. She can no longer recognize the husbands face; he starts to do housework. Arent you going to have any? the husband-like thing said. 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. How History Claims Us: On Made to Explode by Sandra Beasley, Aumaine Rose Smith The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya / Soft Skull Press / 224 pages / 978-1593766788 / 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? The characters featured in them arent particularly good at intimacy, even if they live in close proximity to spouses, old friends, and co-workers. But it would have been suspicious for me to say no. The narrator is surprised, but not at the transformationshe just never knew he wanted that. Soft Skull Press. Left to their own devices, these characters may have been content with the status quo, but the universe Motoya builds taunts them with their secret motivations until theyre forced to confront them publicly. These pastiches, parodies, and hauntings are all brilliantly translatedwith all their uncanny intactby Asa Yoneda. The reader wonders: Am I the strange one? In the darkness, my husband swiftly removed my pajama bottoms. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. Certainly the style will remind readers of the Japanese authors Banana Yoshimoto and Sayaka Murata, but the stories themselvesand the logic, or lack thereof, within their sentencesare reminiscent, at least to this reader, of Joy Williams and Rivka . In Fitting Room, a saleswoman attends day and night to a mysterious customer who refuses to leave a fitting room. The following is from Yukiko Motoya's collection, The Lonesome Bodybuilder. When he notices that the fight has attracted her attention, he accuses her of lusting after the boxers and their muscled bodies. He pulled the strip of squid from his mouth, and said, Itsbecause youre a housewife, San. Other women in the book pursue men who are made of straw or advise each other to marry bicycle saddles. I was secretly impressed by Hakones story. was published in 2005. Snake ball, huh? I poked at a piece of grilled eel laid on the rice, and pictured a bright white ball covered in scales. analyse how our Sites are used. Take whatever form you want to be! The distending body of my husband exploded with a loud pop. 209 pages. Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links, Twelve stories from collections originally published in Japanese in 2015 and 2016, "Her characters seem to be searching for the strangest, and most estranged, parts of themselves. In the collection's longest and scariest story, "An Exotic Marriage," Motoya, through her narrator, lands a flurry of punches against the oppressive domesticity . . Its when Motoya is on the rocky terrain of collapsing relationships that her strangeness finds the friction it needs to stick." Poems That Linger: Peter Campions One Summer Evening at the Falls, Johannes Gransson So you collect the money, and then what?, When youve collected enough, you can buy your own land., You buy your own land, and then? () 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." On Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal, Lisa Hiton [2] After completing high school, Motoya moved to Tokyo to study acting, and won a voice acting role in the Hideaki Anno anime adaptation of Kare Kano, but switched her focus to writing after a teacher praised a short play Motoya wrote for the school's graduation ceremony. . If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for $69 per month. Motoya also discerns the way the pursuit of freedom can be corrupted into cruelty or madness. I was still thinking about the ex-wife following the refrigerator conversation. We used to sing this song all the time. The World Owes You Nothing: A Review of Mine! Claire Crews This is a game where you collect money?. Go, Zoromi, go do it for her. He movedthe cat off the space beside him where shed been asleep, and beckoned to me. The husband, San explains, waited until after their marriage to reveal the depths of his incuriosity. Her work has been adapted multiple times for film. Only when you begin reading, when the . Husbands and Wives Magically Morph in a Japanese Story Collection, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/books/review/lonesome-bodybuilder-yukiko-motoya.html. He currently lives in Washington, DC. -, "Motoya wins over her audience by pushing the absurd to extremes. . 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The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. The title story is one of her best: "Fighters are so . A woman trains as a bodybuilder, adding massive ropes of muscle to her back and shoulders, tripling the width of her neckand her husband doesnt notice. offers FT membership to read for free. Often--no, occasionally--when in a singular state of solitude which follows intense upheaval, there occurs these moments in which the world seems to expand into something unfathomably big. My husband seemed anxious to make a snake ball with me. by Yukiko Motoya ; translated by . The positioning of his incuriosity as though that was who Id been all along, saleswoman... Best: & quot ; in Yukiko Motoya Translated by Asa Yoneda audience pushing... This is a game where you collect money? Translated by Asa.. 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