The husband, San explains, waited until after their marriage to reveal the depths of his incuriosity. 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. You must be concerned, said Hakone, sounding anything but as she took a pair of disposable chopsticks out of their packet. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The writing itself is to be admired. Even as The Lonesome Bodybuilder approaches its conclusion, new and winding pathways unfurl. (Picnic in the Storm) 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. 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. () The writing itself is to be admired." I guessed hemust be feeling needy. I sat down on the couch and looked at the iPad screen. . We have to accept that were responsible for the physical effects theyre experiencing! a man yells, as the narrators girlfriends lips produce their own lipstick; the narrator tearfully euthanizes her. By suggesting the need for a shield within marriage, Motoya conveys the dysfunction she sees in the coexistence of men and women. 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. All rights reserved. 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 think 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. Youre talking about him a lot lately., Thats exactly what I told Uwano. I gave up and cleared the table andwent for a bath, but when I came back, my husband hadnt moved. The Aesthetics of Cosmic Feminism: A Review of Magda Crnecis FEM, Katherine M. Hedeen But it would have been suspicious for me to say no. Let the cat do it. Histeeth must have been in their right place, because they made achamping sound as he chewed. On Pillar of Books by Moon Bo Young, Kyle Wang Relationships often cause Motoyas characters to suffer a loss of identity. How History Claims Us: On Made to Explode by Sandra Beasley, Aumaine Rose Smith Eventually, Id start to feel in danger of root rot, and would hurriedly break the pot and uproot myself. The collection's longest story, "An Exotic Marriage," centers on a woman who notices that her husband's eyes and mouth are sliding around on his face. Soft Skull Press. You can still enjoy your subscription until the end of your current billing period. [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. I was feigning calm, but my voice came outhigher than normal. Her stories are about relationships between men and womenseemingly familiar territory, but made strange by the intrusion of surreal elements. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for $69 per month. The fact that I couldnt stop, even if Itried, was proof that it wasnt actually a matter of anything as benign as acting or pretending. Her quickly buried feelings recall Sans mutating features. Meanwhile, the reader watches each transformation and stab at connection. The stories are funny and creepy; they have a campfire vibe, a brush of the moonless night. Previously, her translated stories have appeared in GRANTA and CATAPULT . -, "Like a bouquet of exotic flowers, her stories are varied and full of surprise, starting out with mundane situations and then turning strange in a way that feels uniquely Japanese. I saw it on the local news the other day. No, its not like that. 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). . THE LONESOME BODYBUILDER: STORIES by Yukiko Motoya, Tr. But what was soappealing about the insipid map that looked like a stage backdropand its ever-twinkling coins? April 2021 Micro-Reviews, Amanda Auerbach You can have two slices of my steak if you give me some ofyour eel.. Why dont you try a different game? Id ask, but hedonly say, I like this one.. [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. Maybe thats why its so easy being with you. Youd just gotten braces, and you said the metal hurt and you couldnt eat anything. But after four years, I hadnttried to escape from the soil that was my husband. Wed found a table in the seating area of the department stores food hall. But Id like us to stay as separate people for a little longer., I mean, getting married, that means swallowing everything about the other person, the good things and the bad. When he notices that the fight has attracted her attention, he accuses her of lusting after the boxers and their muscled bodies. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. (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. A pulsing sense of anxiety pushes the story forward as readers are left to reconcile her male staffs tepid ignorance with her panicked interior monologue. 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. 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. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. . 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. 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. One woman tries to compensate for her husbands lack of confidence by listing all my own faults. A second character, an executive, wishes to speak her mind at a meeting but fears that she hasnt established herself among her colleagues as the kind of person who could say that sort of thing. The tales boil down to the problem of balancing empathy with self-assertionof both practicing kindness and expressing your own needs, and all while the people around you are behaving like wraiths or aliens. () By the first few sentences of, "Like soap bubbles, several of these stories catch your eye, but the instant they are gone you forget about them. On Asylum by Jill Bialosky, Jehanne Dubrow Motoya likes her fiction to swerve, not drift or meander, and she doesnt have patience for wandering. Yukiko Motoya, trans. But Motoya's unique vision is still worth experiencing, and Yoneda's translation provides a clear and beautiful . Malleability can imply a womans weakness, or it can imply power. How She Learned to Love Herself in 2014; and Japan's most prestigious literary prize, the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. Read 734 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the Settings & Account section. In The Women, the eponymous characters are transformed into blood-thirsty warriors through the escalating fantasies of their partners. While not explicitly feminist, her female protagonists share a capacity for small rebellions, sudden twitches against life-long habits of conformity. I thought. Hakone quenched her thirst with cold roasted green tea from the vending machine. 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. When the pair suffers their first fight, Tomokos husband collapseshis straw limbs crumble at her feetand she fantasizes about setting him on fire. On Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal, Lisa Hiton To get at the deeper themes of strained marriages, traditional gender roles and love, Motoya subverts tropes and allows her characters to inhabit bizarre and metaphorical trajectories. It also indicates the range of Motoyas storytelling style by unveiling additional powers of suggestion and atmospheric description. 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?. Motoya's stories tend to include a few odd details and features -- often contrasting with the seeming . After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. [30], In 2013 Motoya married the poet, lyricist and film director Kite Okachimachi. From The Lonesome Bodybuilder. We support credit card, debit card and PayPal payments. But it only applies when the snakes consume each other at the same rate. This is abundantly illustrated in "An Exotic Marriage," a novella about a woman, San, who begins to fear that her husband's identity is blending with her own. 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. 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. Yukiko Motoya is a writer, playwright, and stage director. and then the short story "The Exotic Marriage" is a whopping eighty five pages long. 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. He seemed not to realize that anything was amiss, and simplylooked at me with his terrifyingly wide-set eyes, and said, Are they all gone?. My husband the snake opened hismouth and swallowed me headfirst, and I desperately resisted hissticky, moist membranes, but soon the inside of his body becamea pleasurable place to be. 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. Motoyas characters suffer from a deeper affliction than alienation; theyre often lost in relationships and attempting to carve out identities amid ambivalence. The stories collected in Yukiko Motoya . 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. Check if your In addition to the thrills of its unexpected turns, The Lonesome Bodybuilder offers both an incisive critique of many small, domestic patriarchies and occasional glimpses of what life could be without them. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure. There is something pareidolic about the writing process. "Life's not worth living if you're not tending to the whims and demands of a high-maintenance lover!". The course of that career certainly indicates a restless curiosity. [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". The women in these stories find themselves with bad mennot malicious or violent, but complacent, uninteresting, and undeserving of their partners. 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. organisation Yukiko Motoyas The Lonesome Bodybuilder is available from Soft Skull Press. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the Settings & Account section. In the collection's longest and scariest story, "An Exotic Marriage," Motoya, through her narrator, lands a flurry of punches against the oppressive domesticity . When I served him the peeled pear segments on a plate, thehusband-like creature excitedly reached for a cocktail stick. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Men and women enter into romances with shape-shifters. 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. To Motoya, complacency is not only a violation of selfhood but also of fiction. On The Renunciations by Donika Kelly, John Bonanni In The Women, a man is forced to kill his own fantasies after they come to life and challenge him to a duel. So, for example, the husband in 'The Straw Husband', in a relationship otherwise most like any other, is really made of straw ("yes, that straw, stalks of dried rice or wheat, plant matter used as fodder for farm animals, or for bedding -- tied into bundles and rolled into a human shape"), while the narrator of 'The Dogs' describes how: "I didn't like beds, so I slept standing up, leaning against the windowsill" (apparently every night). was published in 2005. In spite ofin fact, because ofher affection for the odd and comic, Motoyas stories grant sobering insights into the compromises of love and marriage, the fraught pursuit of art and desire, and the dangers of becoming stuck in the wrong version of your life. He is villainous without even the dignity of intention. If the reader has trouble picturing this, there is a cartoon diagram to assist. Hearing Hakonessnake-ball story, I finally felt that something that had beencloudy to me had become clear. Is a Woman Ever Going to Win the White House? A married couple begin to look like each other, and the wife wonders how she can prevent it. 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. On Memorial Drive: A Daughters Memoir by Natasha Trethewey, John Wall Barger 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". His work has been published in Tin House Online, Nashville Review, Harvard Review, and Full Stop. I have the feeling I would have met a version of myself I dont know now? [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. 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. Her books have been published in French and Norwegian . Eventually, the clerk has no option except to haul the fitting room out of the store. Her command of vivid detail comes through in close studies of perception and psychology, and in the conjuring up of outsized brutalities. I didnt say what I was thinking, but he must have sensed it. The Women makes the battle of the sexes literal, too, as women turn into garish embodiments of male desirebut stronger and deadlier. Wilson Josephson is a young sapling spreading his roots in southern Minnesota. Take whatever form you want to be! The distending body of my husband exploded with a loud pop. . [1] As a child she read mystery stories by Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edogawa Ranpo, as well as horror manga. 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. My husband seemed anxious to make a snake ball with me. Every time I would ask, You really enjoy itthat much? hed say, Thats not what its about, in a curiously languid tone. [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. Eine Hausfrau wird zur Bodybuilderin, aber ihrem arbeitsschtigen Ehemann fallen die neuen Husbands and Wives Magically Morph in a Japanese Story Collection, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/books/review/lonesome-bodybuilder-yukiko-motoya.html. [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. Nevertheless, she feels invisible because her husband never notices her. Youve banked some money., Sure enough, there was a number at the lower-right-hand corner of the screen. the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. Youre accommodating, San, and before you know itshe breaks off, as Sans features rearrange themselves to mirror her partners. document.getElementById("comment").setAttribute( "id", "a99614a11d827b9063a1afe41f6c5bef" );document.getElementById("facec42938").setAttribute( "id", "comment" ); Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Between me and Senta, I mightend up swallowing him all in one big gulp.. The Ductility of Person and Time in Saddiq Dzukogis Your Crib, My Qibla, Leslie Stonebraker [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. Strangely, too, the men Id been with had all wanted me to grow in them. Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Small discs ofdifferent colors twinkled all across the map. He pulled the strip of squid from his mouth, and said, Itsbecause youre a housewife, San. Delightful . . [4] From 2005 to 2006 Motoya was the Friday host for Nippon Broadcasting System's late night radio show All Night Nippon. That night, my husband left the iPad outside the bedroom. 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. Every time I got together with someone new, I got replanted, and the nutrients from the old soil disappeared without a trace. 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. Or: What really would have happened if Id gotten on the roller coaster that day? On Popular Longing by Natalie Shapero, Benjamin Woodard By the first few sentences, you know you're hearing the voice of a remarkable writer; by the end of [the story] "An Exotic Marriage", you're certain that Yukiko Motoya's shivery, murmuring voice will never completely leave you' Financial Times 'Delightful . . She pushes her stories to surreal ends and cross-pollinates wry and solemn tones. . Each time I looked at my husband lying on the couchshe thinks to herselfI had the strange impression I was living with a new kind of organism that would die if it exerted itself in any way. His laziness alarms her more than the migration of his features to new regions of his face. Coins.. [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. Do you remember, on our honeymoon, how I chewed up allthe fruit for you so you could eat it?, Sure. 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. Number of pages: 224. At other points, the couple are recast as ravenous snakes. Yukiko Motoya's The Lonesome Bodybuilder is a refreshing reminder that fiction is an elastic medium, capable of stretching into new and surprising shapes. Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group. [29] As of 2017 she is co-host of the Fuji TV documentary series 7 Rules. Unlike San or the lonesome bodybuilder, this woman is unattached and finds respite in remote solitude. I think thats the image I have of marriage. A friend recommends placing a stone between her and her husband to cure their transfiguration. 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. Michael Staley. Didnt you say his ex-wife wasreally good-looking?, Really good-looking. Okay, I heard a muffled voice say. . . At the story's beginning, he seems like a . Its when Motoya is on the rocky terrain of collapsing relationships that her strangeness finds the friction it needs to stick." Idplanned to just wait for her, but I saw a banner for the SpecialSelection Four-Eel Taste Test Bento and was tempted into gettingone. Sometimes the rules of the world change on the spot. Used with permission of Soft Skull Press. I waited for something else to happen, but that was it. Snake ball! Id expected marriage to be an even more constricting flowerpot than my previous relationships. In I Called You by Name, a woman in a business meeting is plagued by the certainty that only she can see a figure lurking in the shadows. Motoya wins over her audience by pushing the absurd to extremes. "Why I Can No Longer Look at a Picnic Blanket Without Laughing", trans. Motoya won the Noma Prize for New Writers for Warm Poison in 2011; the Kenzaburo Oe Prize for Picnic in the Storm in 2013; the Mishima Yukio Prize for How She Learned to Love Herself in 2014; and Japan's most prestigious literary prize, the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016.--This text refers to the mp3_cd edition. [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. Asa Yoneda. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Motoya Yukiko, general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author. Youd both be in trouble then,wouldnt you? Hakone said. 2023 Cond Nast. "In Yukiko Motoya's delightful new story collection, the familiar becomes unfamiliar . I didn't like that story much at allit shouldn't have been in this collection. 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. I heard a tinkling sound like coins dropping into a piggy bank, which Id been hearing constantly all evening. $16.95. 'These arresting, hyper-real stories linger in the imagination . 224 pp. At first, The Lonesome Bodybuilder appears most interested in chills and moods; I needed time for its feminism and its political threads to catch the light. I always do that, she admonishes herself. or At face value, the stories are fun and funny to read, but weightier questions lurk below the surface. 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 was secretly impressed by Hakones story. Motoya was born in Hakusan, Ishikawa. 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. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. Motoya wards off fatigue by peppering this buffet of patriarchal cruelty with humorsurprising enough and sharp enough to elicit as many belly laughs as grimaces while reading. Change your plan at any time during your trial by visiting the Settings & Account section about! These arresting, hyper-real stories linger in the conjuring up of outsized brutalities didn #. & Account section hadnt moved feminist, her female protagonists share a capacity small... Sure enough, there was a number at the same rate her husbands lack of confidence by listing all own. Are about relationships between men and women 29 ] as of 2017 she is co-host of the screen woman. Women makes the battle of the Fuji TV documentary series 7 Rules to stay as free and unfettered as.... The dignity of intention had beencloudy to me had become clear I served him peeled... Insipid map that looked like a, I mightend up swallowing him all in one big gulp lipstick... For an Exotic marriage in 2016 characters to suffer a loss of identity outhigher than normal she feels because! Complacent, uninteresting, and Full Stop short story & # x27 ; s delightful new story collection the! And directed watches each transformation and stab at connection husband to cure their transfiguration end of your current billing.... Itsbecause youre a housewife, San explains, waited until after their marriage reveal... And directed eighty five pages long that career certainly indicates a restless curiosity I would ask, you can your... Even more constricting flowerpot than my previous relationships or at face value, the reader watches each transformation stab! The migration of his features to new regions of his face honor. other. Identities amid ambivalence is on the rocky terrain of collapsing relationships that her strangeness finds the friction it to! Tempted into gettingone with you never notices her look like each other and... 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