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. 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. Near But Not Touching: On The Naomi Letters by Rachel Mennies, Tracy Zeman by the end of "An Exotic Marriage," you're certain that Yukiko Motoya's shivery, murmuring voice will never completely leave you." --Financial Times "Motoya . The Aesthetics of Cosmic Feminism: A Review of Magda Crnecis FEM, Katherine M. Hedeen Its also the collections penultimate entry. . At face value, the stories are fun and funny to read, but weightier questions lurk below the surface. 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 ! How could he even see straight? New York, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2018. [29] As of 2017 she is co-host of the Fuji TV documentary series 7 Rules. Motoya's stories tend to include a few odd details and features -- often contrasting with the seeming . 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. The unsettling stories in The Lonesome Bodybuilder are deeply preoccupied with the yawning disconnect between people. Soft Skull Press. I decide who I am, and never consider other possibilities. In another story, I Called You by Name, an ad exec compares her past and present, recalling her earlier determination to never allow herself to be bound by anything as common as common sense.. I waited for something else to happen, but that was it. Even as The Lonesome Bodybuilder approaches its conclusion, new and winding pathways unfurl. 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. In a brilliant analogy, she compares marriage to a snake ball: There are two snakes, and they each start cannibalizing the other ones tail. His face was barely maintaining a form that could even berecognized as human. . For the narrator, San, a bored housewife whose husband ignores her in favor of TV and video games, anxiety is manifested literallyand strangely. Motoyas characters tend to be housewives and service workers, and her tales revolve around intimate or faux-intimate relationships. and then the short story "The Exotic Marriage" is a whopping eighty five pages long. This is a game where you collect money?. Asa Yoneda. Hakone swiftly referred to the floor guide and said, This way, and took off without sparing a glance at the stalls she passed. Men entered into me through my roots like nutrients dissolved in potting soil. 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. offers FT membership to read for free. 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. 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. Although the stories are often funny, theyre not sarcastic or ironic, and Motoyas not really kidding. I was secretly impressed by Hakones story. Didnt you say his ex-wife wasreally good-looking?, Really good-looking. 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. Oh, those, my husband said, turning his shoulders towardme. 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 . Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature, Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window), Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window). On If by Song by Marcia Karp, Brian Chander Wiora But what was soappealing about the insipid map that looked like a stage backdropand its ever-twinkling coins? [22], Motoya continued writing and directing plays for her theatre company while also writing short stories and novels, and in 2006 she became the youngest person ever to win the Tsuruya Nanboku Memorial Award for Best Play, which she received for her play Snan (Distress). By the first few sentences of The Lonesome Bodybuilder, you know you're hearing the voice of a remarkable writer; by the end of "An Exotic Marriage," you're certain that Yukiko Motoya's shivery, murmuring voice will never completely leave you." --Financial Times "Motoya [has a] gift for making the ordinary magical." --Jane Ciabattari, BBC Culture Reverberations and Divinations in Kazim Alis The Voice of Sheila Chandra, Peter Campion 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. THE LONESOME BODYBUILDER: STORIES by Yukiko Motoya, Tr. Let the cat do it. Soft Skull Press. 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. She 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 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. 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. Youve banked some money., Sure enough, there was a number at the lower-right-hand corner of the screen. Then you collect those, so you can bank money again. When he made me sit with him while he watched his varietyshows, claiming it was more fun than watching alone, it had to bethat he was trying to erase the chilly gaze that he felt I was directingat him. 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. In these contexts, Motoyas characters come to recognize the possibilities theyve denied themselves. 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. August 2021 Micro-Reviews, Christina Pugh I wonder. What would you think if you saw his true form? Then you can buy even more land.. Never is the ennui of these men treated as anything more than a product of their privilege and their twisted expectations of the people around themwhich rescues much of the collection from a dive into the dour and dismal. [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 weird garbled messages?, No, but you can just tell these things sometimes., Huh. I was still thinking about the ex-wife following the refrigerator conversation. The women in these stories find themselves with bad mennot malicious or violent, but complacent, uninteresting, and undeserving of their partners. But after four years, I hadnttried to escape from the soil that was my husband. I dont remember where I read it. Each of these titles represents an energizing alternative to the ripped-apart illogic of our contemporary reality. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. The husband, San explains, waited until after their marriage to reveal the depths of his incuriosity. Each time I looked at my husband lying on the couch, I had the strange impression I was living with a new kind of organism that would die if it exerted itself in any way. Every time Inoticed myself acting as though that was who Id been all along,a chill went up my spine. On Asylum by Jill Bialosky, Jehanne Dubrow Her only companionship comes from a pack of mysterious dogs that, unbeknownst to her, terrorize the nearby village until there is no one left. 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. In another, a man sees his girlfriends lips begin to bleed a lipstick hue he has fantasized about her wearing. 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. That night, my husband left the iPad outside the bedroom. [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. Her books have . Her varied work has resulted in numerous accolades, and, most recently, the release of The Lonesome Bodybuilder, the first book-length English translation of her fiction. Yukiko Motoyas The Lonesome Bodybuilder is a refreshing reminder that fiction is an elastic medium, capable of stretching into new and surprising shapes. Q&A, which is presented as the deathbed ravings of a beauty columnist, is a meta delirium of tips, callbacks to previous stories, and rage. He currently lives in Washington, DC. 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. Her first story, ""Eriko to zettai,"" appeared in the literary magazine Gunzo in 2002. the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. Premium Digital includes access to our premier business column, Lex, as well as 15 curated newsletters covering key business themes with original, in-depth reporting. Sometimes the rules of the world change on the spot. On The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy, Peter Campion In the novella-length "An Exotic Marriage," San is concerned about her husband's increasing lassitude about work, and her perception that his facial . . personalising content and ads, providing social media features and to [5] She appears in the ending sequences of FLCL during credits, in which she's listed as model. Or: Weeping, I swung at her head with a club Id taken off a man Id kicked to the ground? Paper, $16.95. I could have understood if the game offered a vision of a wonderful world more exciting than real life. Wilson Josephson is a young sapling spreading his roots in southern Minnesota. 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. This criticism becomes pointed when juxtaposed with the final story in the collection, The Straw Husband, about a newlywed woman named Tomoko who is unfailingly devoted to her husband, a man made of straw. But it only applies when the snakes consume each other at the same rate. They confront their stifled independence: velleities give way to keen yearnings, desires twist toward violence. Other nuances arrive in Paprika Jiro, a story that conveys a fondness for mercantile traditions. April 2021 Micro-Reviews, Amanda Auerbach This sense of unpredictability traverses the entire collection, and yet the stories rarely seem desultory. From The Lonesome Bodybuilder. Her husbands jealousy is another form of misperception. Even the missteps attest to Motoyas fictive mandate: to be unburdened by rules and restraints. The Grandfather of New Nature Writing Was a Bird-Loving Poet. Some Googling I did found out that this was actually published as a novella . . 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. 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. [4] From 2005 to 2006 Motoya was the Friday host for Nippon Broadcasting System's late night radio show All Night Nippon. The positioning of his features was deteriorating faster thanever. 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. Strangely, too, the men Id been with had all wanted me to grow in them. Her work has been adapted multiple times for film. Poems That Linger: Peter Campions One Summer Evening at the Falls, Johannes Gransson After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. Used with permission of Soft Skull Press. One of Mocketts main foci is an introduction to Hayao Kawais suggestion of an aesthetic solution common in Japanese literature. These pastiches, parodies, and hauntings are all brilliantly translatedwith all their uncanny intactby Asa Yoneda. Unearthing Memory and Reclaiming the Feminine in Shanta Lee Ganders GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA, Chris Via [24] In 2009 her play Shiawase saiko arigat maji de, about a woman who enters a couple's home and declares that she is the husband's mistress, won the 53rd Kishida Kunio Drama Award. But Motoya's unique vision is still worth experiencing, and Yoneda's translation provides a clear and beautiful . Check if your The Lonesome Bodybuilder is made up of 10 short stories, some barely three or four pages long, and a novella, "An Exotic Marriage". Some changes render you, paradoxically, more yourself. Her books have been published or are forthcoming in French, Norwegian, Spanish, and Chinese, . 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. The characters featured in them arent particularly good at intimacy, even if they live in close proximity to spouses, old friends, and co-workers. Their changing forms force San and her husband to confront the half-truths their marriage is founded on. 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 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. 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. . Youd just gotten braces, and you said the metal hurt and you couldnt eat anything. Its when Motoya is on the rocky terrain of collapsing relationships that her strangeness finds the friction it needs to stick." 'These arresting, hyper-real stories linger in the imagination . To Motoya, complacency is not only a violation of selfhood but also of fiction. In the collection's longest and scariest story, "An Exotic Marriage," Motoya, through her narrator, lands a flurry of punches against the oppressive domesticity . I didn't like that story much at allit shouldn't have been in this collection. Motoya was born in Hakusan, Ishikawa. Why was I so happy to be married to a bunch of straw?, she wonders to herself, before finally reassembling him. 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. Motoya Yukiko, general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author. 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 . I thought perhaps the gamegot more interesting the longer you played, but whenever I lookedover my husbands shoulder, the screen always looked the same. 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. We used to sing this song all the time. [9][11] Though Nurui doku did not win the Akutagawa Prize, it won the 33rd Noma Literary New Face Prize. Uwano recommended this game, my husband said at last. Or: What really would have happened if Id gotten on the roller coaster that day? Story Comes From Place: On Site Fidelity by Claire Boyles, Jasmine V. Bailey 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. Hakone quenched her thirst with cold roasted green tea from the vending machine. Youknow, I think pears might be my favorite fruit, he announced. These stories are pointed, possessed by a defiant and often violent spirit. . You can have two slices of my steak if you give me some ofyour eel.. Motoyas emphases include tedious relationships, workplace gender dynamics, and the soporific entertainments and culinary distractions of our modern age. Nov. 2018. () The writing itself is to be admired." 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. Asa Yoneda, the books translator, has signal-boosted a story collection whose off-kilter style strenuously upholds Motoyas stated mission. Mud Stuck to our Shoes: On The Insistence of Harm by Fernando Valverde, Edward Derby Maybe partly because of the TV feature, the late-afternoon deli counters were thronged with people. [21] Nilanjana Roy, in her review for the Financial Times, concluded that "Yukiko Motoyas shivery, murmuring voice will never completely leave you". The Dogs avoids such risks by dint of its elusiveness and subtlety. The Lonesome Bodybuilder (published as Picnic in the Storm in the UK .) How She Learned to Love Herself in 2014; and Japan's most prestigious literary prize, the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. Many of the characters seek lives yet unlived, or lives once lived but later forgotten. 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. 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. I was feigning calm, but my voice came outhigher than normal. The Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers, Developmental Editing Fellowship for Emerging Writers, Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. John Scioli, the owner of the Community Bookstore, in Brooklyn, prepares to shutter a neighborhood institution. What are you doing on there? I peered over his shoulder. Walker Rutter-Bowman received his MFA from Syracuse University. Margaryta Golovchenko. I always do that, she admonishes herself. On Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal, Lisa Hiton At the story's beginning, he seems like a . After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. In the wonderful title story, the narrator returns from the grocery store to find her husband sitting on the couch, watching a boxing match. Empire Gold : A Review of Claire Meuschkes UPEND, John Wall Barger Hakone hummed and said nothing. The protagonist in the title story grows fond of combat sports and wonders why this didnt occur much earlier. In The Women, a citys female population contracts a virus that turns them into homicidal hotties. Her books have been published or are forthcoming in French, Norwegian, Spanish, and Chinese, . Copyright 2018 by Yukiko Motoya. 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. The pears?. Go, Zoromi, go do it for her. He movedthe cat off the space beside him where shed been asleep, and beckoned to me. No one in Yukiko Motoyas new story collection, The Lonesome Bodybuilder, appears capable of seeing herself in the mirror. 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. Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs. I fled from thetinkling of coins falling and the suckling sound of him chewingon dried squid. An insidious exchange of traits and gender stereotypes unfolds and the boundaries between the two characters become porous. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. Husbands and Wives Magically Morph in a Japanese Story Collection, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/books/review/lonesome-bodybuilder-yukiko-motoya.html. When he notices that the fight has attracted her attention, he accuses her of lusting after the boxers and their muscled bodies. In Yukiko Motoya's delightful new story collection, the familiar becomes unfamiliar. (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.) Yukiko Motoya's imagination is wild and rich in her eleven whimsical short stories in this book. $16.95. It also indicates the range of Motoyas storytelling style by unveiling additional powers of suggestion and atmospheric description. I guessed hemust be feeling needy. 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? Soft Skull Press. 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