and then the short story "The Exotic Marriage" is a whopping eighty five pages long. analyse how our Sites are used. Motoyas protagonists feel quietly radical in a literary moment that seems particularly interested in unpacking various forms of narcissism. Hakone swiftly referred to the floor guide and said, This way, and took off without sparing a glance at the stalls she passed. The course of that career certainly indicates a restless curiosity. Perhaps the most resonant stories are those about marriage; Motoya (a playwright as well as an author) excels in putting husband and wife through unusual trials. What are you doing on there? I peered over his shoulder. Coins.. Youre talking about him a lot lately., Thats exactly what I told Uwano. 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. Story Comes From Place: On Site Fidelity by Claire Boyles, Jasmine V. Bailey She pushes her stories to surreal ends and cross-pollinates wry and solemn tones. 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. (Picnic in the Storm) The unsettling way people can lose themselves to mundanity and wrestle to reclaim their selfhood is best illustrated in the novella-length An Exotic Marriage. Originally published on its own, it earned Motoya the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 2016 and was translated for this collection. Motoyas book beguiles with its reversals: the bodybuilders husband may be unobservant to the point of eeriness, but, as it turns out, she is the shape-shifter, the trickster. But it only applies when the snakes consume each other at the same rate. A sales associate at a boutique stays overnight digging up outfits for someoneor somethingthat wont leave the dressing room. The Lonesome Bodybuilder Michael Staley. 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. Standard Digital includes access to a wealth of global news, analysis and expert opinion. Infinite Entanglements in Allison Cobbs Plastic: An Autobiography, Elizabeth Bailey 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? On Places Ive Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown, Art Edwards If the reader has trouble picturing this, there is a cartoon diagram to assist. . After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. In The Women, a citys female population contracts a virus that turns them into homicidal hotties. Paper, $16.95. On Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal, Lisa Hiton One of the collections most active narrators is the curmudgeonly craftswoman at the center of The Dogs, the penultimate story. [27][28] Starting in 2014 she was a regular host for Season 4 of the TBS Radio program "The Top 5". Her stories are about relationships between men and womenseemingly familiar territory, but made strange by the intrusion of surreal elements. 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. Such endings introduce a kind of ontological flexibility into the very structure of the storythey bring an essential playfulness to the work that is much more engaging and absorbing than a more rigid finale. THE LONESOME BODYBUILDER By Yukiko Motoya Translated by Asa Yoneda 224 pp. For the first time in months, his hand crept into my bed, undermy comforter. 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. Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. 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. Perhaps the most resonant stories are those about marriage; Motoya (a playwright as well as an author) excels in putting husband and wife through unusual trials. Yukiko Motoya is a writer, playwright, and stage director. The title story is one of her best: "Fighters are so . That only made the boundary between the skin of ourentwined bodies even hazier. The narrator is surprised, but not at the transformationshe just never knew he wanted that. Hey, give itback if youre not even going to play. My husband took the iPadfrom my hand and sank his head back to the game. In the opening story, a meek saleswoman whos taken up bodybuilding practices flexing, but drops the pose without having been able to look my mirror self in the eye. In another, a bored housewife notes that sometimes she looked in the mirror and was reminded of a blank postcard. Marriage, she concludes, has made her resemblance to paper even more notable than before. . But Motoya's unique vision is still worth experiencing, and Yoneda's translation provides a clear and beautiful . For the narrator, San, a bored housewife whose husband ignores her in favor of TV and video games, anxiety is manifested literallyand strangely. Then I felt skinslacken, and bodies start to yield, and then I could no longer tellwhose sensations I was feeling. Histeeth must have been in their right place, because they made achamping sound as he chewed. Her only companionship comes from a pack of mysterious dogs that, unbeknownst to her, terrorize the nearby village until there is no one left. 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. With frank sincerity, Motoya makes the exhausted clichs of marriage and intimacy literal, and thus, energetically strange. Her work has been adapted multiple times for film. THE LONESOME BODYBUILDER: STORIES by Yukiko Motoya, Tr. At face value, the stories are fun and funny to read, but weightier questions lurk below the surface. . 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". Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. 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. Go, Zoromi, go do it for her. He movedthe cat off the space beside him where shed been asleep, and beckoned to me. Her books have . Maybe someone told it tome, a long time ago. Between me and Senta, I mightend up swallowing him all in one big gulp.. the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. 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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. In the collection's longest and scariest story, "An Exotic Marriage," Motoya, through her narrator, lands a flurry of punches against the oppressive domesticity . As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Marie Mockett takes umbrage, in her excellent Lit Hub essay Our Fairy Tales, Ourselves, with critics and philosophers whose pursuit of universal laws of narrative structure blind them to the expansive possibilities of literature. Yeah. My husband nodded while sucking on a strip of dried squid. The collection is more hits than misses, but a few stories, like Paprika Jiro and Typhoon, skew too quirky and become trivial, though theyre buoyant with fancy. To Motoya, complacency is not only a violation of selfhood but also of fiction. Her first story, ""Eriko to zettai,"" appeared in the literary magazine Gunzo in 2002. Margaryta Golovchenko. . Id expected marriage to be an even more constricting flowerpot than my previous relationships. You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. In these contexts, Motoyas characters come to recognize the possibilities theyve denied themselves. Do you think hes still getting them? Touch one and see, he said, so I tried pressing on a browndisc with my finger. 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. -, "Motoya wins over her audience by pushing the absurd to extremes. Delightful . Yukiko Motoyas The Lonesome Bodybuilder is available from Soft Skull Press. By then I was actively feeding my bodyto him to be devoured. As if to prove it, I could hardly recall the men Id been with before. 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. 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. From The Lonesome Bodybuilder. 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. Uwano again? 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. It settled to the floor in countless small clumps. Freed, he turns into a mountain peony. The positioning of his features was deteriorating faster thanever. 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