The complete review's Review: . Even as The Lonesome Bodybuilder approaches its conclusion, new and winding pathways unfurl. [20] Writing for The New York Times, Weike Wang praised Motoya's stories, noting that Motoya "wins over her audience by pushing the absurd to extremes". Motoya wins over her audience by pushing the absurd to extremes. I was secretly impressed by Hakones story. 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. 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. Near But Not Touching: On The Naomi Letters by Rachel Mennies, Tracy Zeman By then I was actively feeding my bodyto him to be devoured. In the title story, a husband watches a boxing match and asks his wife what she thinks of his body. Even the missteps attest to Motoyas fictive mandate: to be unburdened by rules and restraints. Motoya won the Noma Prize for New Writers for Warm Poison in 2011; the Kenzaburo Oe Prize for Picnic in the Storm in 2013 . Both women, at the service of their partners desires, are reshaped by othersan easy way to become a stranger to yourself in Motoyas world. Matthew D. Rodrigues's writing has appeared in Quill & Quire, The Hedgehog Review, and Fandor. Other extraordinary examples from the collection: A girlfriend challenges her boyfriend to a duel and turns into a miniskirt-wearing siren; a husband made of straw harps on his wife to take better care of their BMW. Motoya locates a venerable sense of ancestry and inherited duty in the storys young market trader. Motoyas protagonists feel quietly radical in a literary moment that seems particularly interested in unpacking various forms of narcissism. We support credit card, debit card and PayPal payments. Asa Yoneda, the books translator, has signal-boosted a story collection whose off-kilter style strenuously upholds Motoyas stated mission. [30], In 2013 Motoya married the poet, lyricist and film director Kite Okachimachi. I heard a tinkling sound like coins dropping into a piggy bank, which Id been hearing constantly all evening. 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. $16.95. I wasexpecting some cutting-edge visual effects, but what I saw wasan image representing what looked like oceans and continents,drawn in simple lines like in old Nintendo games. She admits that she has lost confidence in herself, living with a perfectionist husband (who doesn't pay that much attention to her, long oblivious even to the dramatic physical change she undergoes). English translation copyright 2018 by Asa Yoneda. Any reader pursuing concrete examples of nimble writing and unconventional resolutions could do a hell of a lot worse than Yukiko Motoyas The Lonesome Bodybuilder, a collection of short stories that mangle and deform the familiar until it becomes something both wildly unexpected and deeply welcome. At face value, the stories are fun and funny to read, but weightier questions lurk below the surface. "Why I Can No Longer Look at a Picnic Blanket Without Laughing", trans. "That Morning, When It", trans. Okay, I heard a muffled voice say. Was that the fault of the soil, or did the problem lie in the roots? Fun and funny . Then you can buy even more land.. I shivered, then looked up and saw there was an AC ventembedded in the ceiling right above my head. In these contexts, Motoyas characters come to recognize the possibilities theyve denied themselves. The course of that career certainly indicates a restless curiosity. 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. Asa Yoneda, This page was last edited on 18 November 2022, at 09:31. Soft Skull Press. I think?. Do you know the story of the snake ball? 2023 Cond Nast. One of the collections most active narrators is the curmudgeonly craftswoman at the center of The Dogs, the penultimate story. Motoyas emphases include tedious relationships, workplace gender dynamics, and the soporific entertainments and culinary distractions of our modern age. But what was soappealing about the insipid map that looked like a stage backdropand its ever-twinkling coins? The narrator is surprised, but not at the transformationshe just never knew he wanted that. She becomes the bulge in the curtain, the shadow on the other side of the glassthe strange one. Ikiteru dake de ai was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize,[9] and was later adapted into a 2018 film of the same name. That entreatyTake whatever form you want to be!might as well be Motoya imploring writers to make fiction pop and burst, to send it rolling out of the boutique and down the hill, curtain flapping. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. 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. 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". I thought. Number of pages: 224. Nov. 2018. All rights reserved. Maybe someone told it tome, a long time ago. Snake ball, huh? I poked at a piece of grilled eel laid on the rice, and pictured a bright white ball covered in scales. Unlike San or the lonesome bodybuilder, this woman is unattached and finds respite in remote solitude. On Asylum by Jill Bialosky, Jehanne Dubrow I was still thinking about the ex-wife following the refrigerator conversation. But it would have been suspicious for me to say no. All the while, it seems her husband cant be bothered to noticeshe is an afterthought only, and he appears to be too bored of life to be able to sense the swirling wonder of her story. That night, my husband left the iPad outside the bedroom. You can have two slices of my steak if you give me some ofyour eel.. He has received fellowships from the Edward Albee Foundation and the Ucross Foundation. 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. Mud Stuck to our Shoes: On The Insistence of Harm by Fernando Valverde, Edward Derby 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 titular bodybuilder lives what seems to be a structured, self-contained life (I decide who I am, and never consider other possibilities); bodybuilding is an exciting new discovery that expands her world. by Yukiko Motoya ; translated by . I was folding laundry on the living room floor. can lose themselves to mundanity and wrestle to reclaim their selfhood is best illustrated in the novella-length "An Exotic Marriage . There are two snakes, and they each start cannibalizing the other ones tail. So I ordered a fruit platter from room service, and chewed it all up and spat it out onto the plate, and gave it to you., The husband-like thingsvoice sounded indistinct, as if it were coming from behind a wall of water. But I guess that cant be right. 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. A married couple begin to look like each other, and the wife wonders how she can prevent it. A day goes by, and the clerk, who stays all night, offers the woman every piece of clothing in the store, then buys her clothes from another boutique to try on. I always do that, she admonishes herself. Yukiko Motoya ( , Motoya Yukiko, born July 14, 1979) is a Japanese novelist, playwright, theatre director, and former voice actress. 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. I didnt let myself be bound by anything as common as common senseonly to be rewarded with surreal proof that her eyes had not deceived her. 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?. 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. Certainly the style will remind readers of the Japanese authors Banana Yoshimoto and Sayaka Murata, but the stories themselves and the logic, or lack thereof, within their sentences are reminiscent, at least to this reader, of Joy Williams and Rivka Galchen and George Saunders. or . She looked like she was giving it some serious thought. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. [26], Nobuko Tanaka of The Japan Times has called Motoya "the darling of Japanese media" for her frequent contributions to Japanese magazines, television, and radio. The 11 stories in the collection follow individuals who lift the curtains of their orderly homes and workplaces, are confronted with the bizarre, the grotesque, and the alien, and are ultimately led to liberation. Her eyes were focused on the booths cloud-glass partition, but her mouth was still chewing away steadily at the steak. March 2021 Micro-Reviews, Amy Hassinger Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. In Fitting Room, the customer never comes out. Asa Yoneda. The wife tries her best to boost his ego, fails, then decides to take up bodybuilding. Her command of vivid detail comes through in close studies of perception and psychology, and in the conjuring up of outsized brutalities. On The Curious Thing by Sandra Lim, Diana Whitney . Poems That Linger: Peter Campions One Summer Evening at the Falls, Johannes Gransson Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group. The Grandfather of New Nature Writing Was a Bird-Loving Poet. On Places Ive Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown, Art Edwards 209 pages. On The Atmospherians by Alex McElroy, Asa Drake Ad Choices. The reader wonders: Am I the strange one? 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. You should be careful, her neighbor tells her. 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. Motoyas women exist most vividly in their own heads, a state of being that often leaves them feeling alone in a crowd. . This really takes me back. On the screen, a quiz show was posing a question about an ad that had been on heavy rotation just after wed gotten married. His work has been published in Tin House Online, Nashville Review, Harvard Review, and Full Stop. [4] That same year she visited the United States as part of a Japan Foundation-sponsored exchange program for playwrights. An Exotic Marriage, which has some of my favorite elementsa burst of an ending, a Motoya premise built of clever conceit and thoughtful perceptionis inexplicably long, with several side-plots cluttering the central story. Normally he was never this insistent. She comes to have a community of people who support her, and her bulging musclesher arms looked huge enough to snap a log in halfearn her a following at the natural-beauty store where she works. Sometimes the rules of the world change on the spot. Didnt you say his ex-wife wasreally good-looking?, Really good-looking. The writing itself is to be admired. Look at the bottom of the screen. Youd both be in trouble then,wouldnt you? Hakone said. Yukiko Motoya, trans. and other data for a number of reasons, such as keeping FT Sites reliable and secure, 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. 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. No, I said. Eventually, the clerk has no option except to haul the fitting room out of the store. 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. She has glimmering pink hair, shes an unstoppable ninja, she fights bad guys in the garden every day. 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