[27][28] Starting in 2014 she was a regular host for Season 4 of the TBS Radio program "The Top 5". At the story's beginning, he seems like a . Asa Yoneda. . 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. [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. Some Googling I did found out that this was actually published as a novella . Hakone hummed and said nothing. Any changes made can be done at any time and will become effective at the end of the trial period, allowing you to retain full access for 4 weeks, even if you downgrade or cancel. Touch one and see, he said, so I tried pressing on a browndisc with my finger. 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. Every time I got together with someone new, I got replanted, and the nutrients from the old soil disappeared without a trace. Why dont you try a different game? Id ask, but hedonly say, I like this one.. Maybe someone told it tome, a long time ago. Oh, those, my husband said, turning his shoulders towardme. [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. Theyhad a feature on department store deli eats, and the Spicy FilletSteak Summer Set Bento just looked so delicious, she said, flattening her plump eyelids in anticipation. Uwano again? These stories, tinged with magical elements, see characters toeing the line between independence and isolation: A teardrop of blood or a shape-shifting rock can unmask deep-seated realities that theyre tempted to ignore in favor of unfulfilling marriages and quotidian chores. Her books have been published or are forthcoming in French, Norwegian, Spanish, and Chinese, . (Picnic in the Storm) 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. The course of that career certainly indicates a restless curiosity. Do you think hes too immature? The Dogs avoids such risks by dint of its elusiveness and subtlety. John Scioli, the owner of the Community Bookstore, in Brooklyn, prepares to shutter a neighborhood institution. Motoyas prose advances a similar principle. You can still enjoy your subscription until the end of your current billing period. 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 . When I sat down next to him, the husband-like thing pickedup the TV remote and started flipping through channels. 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? . Do you know the story of the snake ball? 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. Its also the collections penultimate entry. San isnt the only woman in Motoyas stories who feels neglected and vaguely undefined. Motoya was born in Hakusan, Ishikawa. In The Straw Husband, the narrators husband is just that, straw, but his composition is less concerning than his inordinate devotion to his car. 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. From The Lonesome Bodybuilder. One of the collections most active narrators is the curmudgeonly craftswoman at the center of The Dogs, the penultimate story. 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. and then the short story "The Exotic Marriage" is a whopping eighty five pages long. Men entered into me through my roots like nutrients dissolved in potting soil. Motoya pushes the premise further: as the narrators body drastically changes, her husband doesnt see it. The Ductility of Person and Time in Saddiq Dzukogis Your Crib, My Qibla, Leslie Stonebraker Trumps performative macho is scaring voters in both parties away from women candidates. To Motoya, complacency is not only a violation of selfhood but also of fiction. His misperception becomes literal: he cant grasp whats right in front of him. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. She endures this at first but later partakes in it, finding herself pulled into her husbands orbithis daily consumption of variety shows and deep-fried food. Sign up for our mailing list to get the latest updates on happenings at Maudlin House, and product discounts! 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. Theres a Jungian undercurrent in Motoyas writing, which seems to prize self-actualization as a way to mendor endtroubled relationships. But after four years, I hadnttried to escape from the soil that was my husband. But something else is at work, too: throughout the collection, and especially in stories like Typhoon, Straw Husband, and The Dogs. Their tone is light and good-natured, but they mean to modify by force the received notions of relationships and their default mode of subjugated women. The narrator is surprised, but not at the transformationshe just never knew he wanted that. 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. How She Learned to Love Herself in 2014; and Japan's most prestigious literary prize, the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. Everyday objects and places are transformed into odd salves for the hyper-fractured lives of these characters, adding a mischievous streak to The Lonesome Bodybuilder. 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. 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. New York, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2018. 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. All this time, I had been feedingmyself to those men. by Michael Heller and James Salzman, Zach Savich 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. 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. The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya (2018). 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. Her quickly buried feelings recall Sans mutating features. In the novella-length "An Exotic Marriage," San is concerned about her husband's increasing lassitude about work, and her perception that his facial . In Fitting Room, the customer never comes out. My body was startingto coil, and I tried to stop thinking by closing my eyes even more tightly. 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 course of that career certainly indicates a restless curiosity. 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. He currently lives in Washington, DC. I was secretly impressed by Hakones story. . Characters change . And so it is throughout: all these husbands are brutally banal in their ignorance, their apathies, and their cruelties. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. 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. The story ends on a note of limitlessness: Anything at all could turn out to be something beyond my wildest dreams.. In The Women, a citys female population contracts a virus that turns them into homicidal hotties. The ride can be anxious but never dull. On Exclusions by Noah Falck, Jim Johnstone 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. August 2021 Micro-Reviews, Christina Pugh Husbands and Wives Magically Morph in a Japanese Story Collection, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/books/review/lonesome-bodybuilder-yukiko-motoya.html. 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. She commits to it, lifting regularly and consuming protein powder, yet while others notice her transformation, her husband does not. Motoya likes her fiction to swerve, not drift or meander, and she doesnt have patience for wandering. 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. [19] It included a new translation of Irui konin tan under the title "An Exotic Marriage". In "An Exotic Marriage," the collection's centerpiece, the narrator, Sen, marries a man who refuses to engage with the world. What happens then?, Yeah. He is villainous without even the dignity of intention. One woman puts it to her husband directly: You can stop being husband shaped now! On The Nightfields by Joanna Klink, Patrick Davis 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. It featured eel sourced from the Shimanto River, Lake Hamana,the Mikawa region, and Miyazaki Prefecture, grilled bothwith sauce and without. . Or: What really would have happened if Id gotten on the roller coaster that day? The complete review's Review: . Why was I so happy to be married to a bunch of straw?, she wonders to herself, before finally reassembling him. Near But Not Touching: On The Naomi Letters by Rachel Mennies, Tracy Zeman . The same goes for San, whose face melts into new patterns. When something akin to freedom is gained, its often vague or ostensible, but the impediments to that freedom are surveyed in great detail. "The Lonesome Bodybuilder", trans. 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. Every time I would ask, You really enjoy itthat much? hed say, Thats not what its about, in a curiously languid tone. My husband seemed anxious to make a snake ball with me. In the collection's longest and scariest story, "An Exotic Marriage," Motoya, through her narrator, lands a flurry of punches against the oppressive domesticity . Uwano recommended this game, my husband said at last. 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. No, I said. 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. Maybe thats why its so easy being with you. Sometimes the rules of the world change on the spot. You can have two slices of my steak if you give me some ofyour eel.. 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. $16.95. Motoya won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's most prestigious literary prize, for AN EXOTIC MARRIAGE, the novella contained in THE LONESOME BODYBUILDER; this book offers the exciting opportunity to introduce Motoya to a U.S. audience. or Ad Choices. (That may be an additional appeal of the gym: in a precarious world, a weight lifter looks exactly like what she is.) analyse how our Sites are used. Longenbachs Forever, Noah Warren We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure. [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. 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 . Didnt you say his ex-wife wasreally good-looking?, Really good-looking. Published in English by Soft Skull Press. In Yukiko Motoya's delightful new story collection, the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Authenticity is a reclamation project, and her characters go to great lengths to prove their agency. Wilson Josephson is a young sapling spreading his roots in southern Minnesota. 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 ! In a brilliant analogy, she compares marriage to a snake ball: There are two snakes, and they each start cannibalizing the other ones tail. . Meanwhile, the reader watches each transformation and stab at connection. In The Women, a man is forced to kill his own fantasies after they come to life and challenge him to a duel. Her eyes were focused on the booths cloud-glass partition, but her mouth was still chewing away steadily at the steak. In the wonderful title story, the narrator returns from the grocery store to find her husband sitting on the couch, watching a boxing match. Michael Staley. You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. 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