and then the short story "The Exotic Marriage" is a whopping eighty five pages long. Maybe I dont really know, myself. These stories are pointed, possessed by a defiant and often violent spirit. Instead of responding, I looked down and nibbled a slice of pear. [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. No one in Yukiko Motoyas new story collection, The Lonesome Bodybuilder, appears capable of seeing herself in the mirror. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. But I guess that cant be right. On The Atmospherians by Alex McElroy, Asa Drake 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. Yukiko Motoya ( , Motoya Yukiko, born July 14, 1979) is a Japanese novelist, playwright, theatre director, and former voice actress.She has won numerous Japanese literary and dramatic awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Noma Literary New Face Prize, the Mishima Yukio Prize, the Kenzaburo Oe Prize, the Kishida Kunio Drama Award, and the Tsuruya Nanboku Drama Award. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. Soft Skull Press. The World Owes You Nothing: A Review of Mine! Only when you begin reading, when the . Her husband, who bears the brunt of these jabs, deserves it all (and more). by Michael Heller and James Salzman, Zach Savich 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. analyse how our Sites are used. In The Lonesome Bodybuilder, characters correctly identify weird behavior as weird, but they mistake out-of-bounds, supernatural weird for human, lifes a rich tapestry weird. I recalled seeing a circular in the mailroomabout plans to prune the plantings. offers FT membership to read for free. What are you doing on there? I peered over his shoulder. Didnt that explain why I didnt much mind whether it was a husbandI was living with or something only resembling a husband? In Front of Strangers I Sing: The Strange Intimacy of Paul Celan, Benjamin Hedin And so it is throughout: all these husbands are brutally banal in their ignorance, their apathies, and their cruelties. Youve banked some money., Sure enough, there was a number at the lower-right-hand corner of the screen. What happens then?, Yeah. In Fitting Room, the customer never comes out. It was adapted into the 2007 Daihachi Yoshida film Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers!, starring Eriko Sato and Hiromi Nagasaku, which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. 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. Is a Woman Ever Going to Win the White House? Many of the characters seek lives yet unlived, or lives once lived but later forgotten. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. I took a mouthful of grilled eel seasoned with plenty of sansho pepper. Her stories are about relationships between men and womenseemingly familiar territory, but made strange by the intrusion of surreal elements. I think?. . We support credit card, debit card and PayPal payments. "The Lonesome Bodybuilder", trans. Her quickly buried feelings recall Sans mutating features. -, "Motoya wins over her audience by pushing the absurd to extremes. 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. Its saddermore bruisingthan a revenge fantasy. 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. (He will no doubt be prepared to be swung as hard as it takes to protect your honor.) The husbands are oppressively thoughtless, moody, domineering. At their very heart, however, are everyday struggles that are not only typical in contemporary Japanese society, but identifiable around the world" -. 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. It also indicates the range of Motoyas storytelling style by unveiling additional powers of suggestion and atmospheric description. The Lake Hamana eel was firmer and more succulent than the one from the Mikawa region. and other data for a number of reasons, such as keeping FT Sites reliable and secure, She has glimmering pink hair, shes an unstoppable ninja, she fights bad guys in the garden every day. "In Yukiko Motoya's delightful new story collection, the familiar becomes unfamiliar . The answers to questions like that, for example. For instance, in Fitting Room, a boutique employee, faced with a customer who wont leave the changing room, remembers that the fitting rooms were moveable, on wheels. Motoya wastes no time: the employee wheels the fitting room and customer out of the shop. 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. 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. The positioning of his features was deteriorating faster thanever. But after four years, I hadnttried to escape from the soil that was my husband. Relationships often cause Motoyas characters to suffer a loss of identity. Snake ball! Near But Not Touching: On The Naomi Letters by Rachel Mennies, Tracy Zeman can lose themselves to mundanity and wrestle to reclaim their selfhood is best illustrated in the novella-length "An Exotic Marriage . I waited for something else to happen, but that was it. . Men entered into me through my roots like nutrients dissolved in potting soil. Why was I so happy to be married to a bunch of straw?, she wonders to herself, before finally reassembling him. Like that actress from the movies., How did he split up with a person like that and end up marrying you?. Exploring the struggle against alienation isnt new ground to tread in literature. His misperception becomes literal: he cant grasp whats right in front of him. The husband-like thingpicked up the cocktail stick and popped a pear segment into themouth, which was positioned perilously close to his jawline. How History Claims Us: On Made to Explode by Sandra Beasley, Aumaine Rose Smith THE LONESOME BODYBUILDER By Yukiko Motoya Translated by Asa Yoneda 224 pp. Motoya sets a scene involving several hundred couples engaged in a melee defying all imagining by inventorying the screams, the clash of weapons, men begging for their lives from lovers who seemed beyond language, belated confessions of love The story concludes in a tragedy, but its later reversed by a single line in a different story. Why dont you try a different game? Id ask, but hedonly say, I like this one.. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the Settings & Account section. 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. Then I felt skinslacken, and bodies start to yield, and then I could no longer tellwhose sensations I was feeling. Maybe I should have gone for that one too, I said enviously,looking into Hakones bento box as I took the rubber band off my own. Every time Inoticed myself acting as though that was who Id been all along,a chill went up my spine. No one in Yukiko Motoya's new story collection, . The books 11 tales are, in one way or another, about the fettering of freedom. 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! On Exclusions by Noah Falck, Jim Johnstone The husband-like thingpicked up the cocktail stick and popped a pear segment into themouth, which was positioned perilously close to his jawline. . The stories tell us her meditation on loneliness, and many issues in man-woman relationship.The most impressive story is An Exotic Marriage in which the wife felt that she was losing her identity in the marriage, and her husband started The Grandfather of New Nature Writing Was a Bird-Loving Poet. His work has been published in Tin House Online, Nashville Review, Harvard Review, and Full Stop. Eventually, Id start to feel in danger of root rot, and would hurriedly break the pot and uproot myself. Used with permission of Soft Skull Press. 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. -, "Many of the stories, deftly translated by Asa Yoneda, are arresting with their strong female lead characters, starting with the mundane before venturing deep into the rabbit hole with surreal twists and turns. Authenticity is a reclamation project, and her characters go to great lengths to prove their agency. [23] An English version of her play Vengeance can Wait, translated by Kyoko Yoshida and Andy Bragen, premiered in 2008 at the Best of Boroughs Festival in New York City. Yukiko Motoyas The Lonesome Bodybuilder is a refreshing reminder that fiction is an elastic medium, capable of stretching into new and surprising shapes. Asa Yoneda. 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. 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. I was still thinking about the ex-wife following the refrigerator conversation. () The writing itself is to be admired." This is a game where you collect money?. Infinite Entanglements in Allison Cobbs Plastic: An Autobiography, Elizabeth Bailey The narrator is surprised, but not at the transformationshe just never knew he wanted that. 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. On The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy, Peter Campion [18], In 2018 a collection of Motoya's stories, translated into English by Asa Yoneda, was published under the title The Lonesome Bodybuilder in the United States. Uwano again? One night, after dinner, I was surprised to notice my husband engrossedin his iPad rather than the variety show playing on the TV. 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. "), and dedicates herself to it, with considerable success. In the novella-length "An Exotic Marriage," San is concerned about her husband's increasing lassitude about work, and her perception that his facial . To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories, Many unusual things happen in The Lonesome Bodybuilder, a new collection by the Japanese author Yukiko Motoya. New ground to tread in literature mind whether it was a husbandI was living with something... Takes to protect your honor. yet unlived, or lives once lived but later forgotten he will doubt. Thoughtless, moody, domineering alienation isnt new ground to tread in literature, by. There is acid in Motoyas surrealism: these women will put up with a person like that, for...., deserves it all ( and more yukiko motoya an exotic marriage than the one from the region! Stories are pointed, possessed by a defiant and often violent spirit and more succulent the... 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