What happens then?, Yeah. In the title story, a husband watches a boxing match and asks his wife what she thinks of his body. 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. . Go, Zoromi, go do it for her. He movedthe cat off the space beside him where shed been asleep, and beckoned to me. Yukiko Motoya's imagination is wild and rich in her eleven whimsical short stories in this book. 224 pp. 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). . Hearing Hakonessnake-ball story, I finally felt that something that had beencloudy to me had become clear. How could he even see straight? Motoyas collection is a bold broadcast: fiction should be wild and daring, and less beholden to the rigors of logic than to the power and potency of surprise. Motoya Yukiko, general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author. Her stories are about relationships between men and womenseemingly familiar territory, but made strange by the intrusion of surreal elements. On Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing by Julie Marie Wade, Matt McBride 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. 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. Her first story, ""Eriko to zettai,"" appeared in the literary magazine Gunzo in 2002. . . Banners positioned around the floor advertised the Beat the Heat Bento Expo. 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. . 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. 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 . When I sat down next to him, the husband-like thing pickedup the TV remote and started flipping through channels. Delightful . In "An Exotic Marriage," the collection's centerpiece, the narrator, Sen, marries a man who refuses to engage with the world. 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 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. Her eyes were focused on the booths cloud-glass partition, but her mouth was still chewing away steadily at the steak. Weight: 196 g. Dimensions: 196 x 126 x 26 mm. Mud Stuck to our Shoes: On The Insistence of Harm by Fernando Valverde, Edward Derby by I was secretly impressed by Hakones story. Copyright 2018 by Yukiko Motoya. 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. 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. "Why I Can No Longer Look at a Picnic Blanket Without Laughing", trans. university But after four years, I hadnttried to escape from the soil that was my husband. I didnt say what I was thinking, but he must have sensed it. Okay. I turned on my heel and went back into the kitchen. The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya (2018). How History Claims Us: On Made to Explode by Sandra Beasley, Aumaine Rose Smith Matthew D. Rodrigues's writing has appeared in Quill & Quire, The Hedgehog Review, and Fandor. What if thereends up being more of the bad? Her books have been published in French and Norwegian . But too much open-mindedness and empathy can become a kind of permeability, and that gets these characters into trouble. I thought perhaps the gamegot more interesting the longer you played, but whenever I lookedover my husbands shoulder, the screen always looked the same. The Lonesome Bodybuilder (published as Picnic in the Storm in the UK .) "In Yukiko Motoya's delightful new story collection, the familiar becomes unfamiliar . The same goes for San, whose face melts into new patterns. The Ductility of Person and Time in Saddiq Dzukogis Your Crib, My Qibla, Leslie Stonebraker () The writing itself is to be admired." Asa Yoneda. I gave up and cleared the table andwent for a bath, but when I came back, my husband hadnt moved. On A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill, Nicholas Bredie But Motoya's unique vision is still worth experiencing, and Yoneda's translation provides a clear and beautiful . The stories consider how it feels to take other people into account, to be forever calibrating your own words and actions in relation to those nearby. 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? The Grandfather of New Nature Writing Was a Bird-Loving Poet. 209 pages. They treat the importance of others inner lives as a given. offers FT membership to read for free. . Motoyas characters tend to be housewives and service workers, and her tales revolve around intimate or faux-intimate relationships. He probably thought that once he and I became one,he would never again have to worry about being judged by others. I followed, but never having been very good at walking throughcrowds, I kept barging into peoples shoulders, and by the time I caught up, she had already joined the line for the steak bento. Motoyas emphases include tedious relationships, workplace gender dynamics, and the soporific entertainments and culinary distractions of our modern age. I was folding laundry on the living room floor. Hakone quenched her thirst with cold roasted green tea from the vending machine. 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. . How to Fix Transistor Radios and Printed Circuits, DR. D.T.R.S BIRDS ARENT REAL CURED MY PARAFEARMONIA: A TESTIMONIAL, ALL MY GENERATION WANTS: an interview with Austin Davis, Find the Shard of Beauty: An Interview with Rebecca van Laer, Sayantani Dasguptas Misbehaving Women an interview byJ aya Wagle, Not Tonight: A Review of Kelly McClures Something Is Always Happening Somewhere, STANDING UNDER THE TREE: A REVIEW OF LEAVE SOCIETY BY TAO LIN, POETS NOT TALKING ABOUT POETRY: MICHAEL SIKKEMA. 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. 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. They may feel separated from others, but they also feel separated from themselves. "You should be careful," her . Motoya also discerns the way the pursuit of freedom can be corrupted into cruelty or madness. The women in these stories find themselves with bad mennot malicious or violent, but complacent, uninteresting, and undeserving of their partners. Every time I got together with someone new, I got replanted, and the nutrients from the old soil disappeared without a trace. [27][28] Starting in 2014 she was a regular host for Season 4 of the TBS Radio program "The Top 5". On Places Ive Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown, Art Edwards Nevertheless, she feels invisible because her husband never notices her. 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. [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. How She Learned to Love Herself in 2014; and Japan's most prestigious literary prize, the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. 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. The 11 short stories in this collection, translated by Asa Yoneda, range in tone from ominous thrillers to lighthearted folktales, but they always seem to return to a depletion of self. 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. Our Final Words: A Review of Eternal Sentences by Michael McGriff, Katherine M. Hedeen analyse how our Sites are used. [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. Wilson Josephson is a young sapling spreading his roots in southern Minnesota. The option to explode a life or a story greatly appeals to her. Other women in the book pursue men who are made of straw or advise each other to marry bicycle saddles. At their very heart, however, are everyday struggles that are not only typical in contemporary Japanese society, but identifiable around the world" -. Michael Staley. That only made the boundary between the skin of ourentwined bodies even hazier. 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?. Normally he was never this insistent. . The Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers, Developmental Editing Fellowship for Emerging Writers, Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. 209 pages. 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 . They confront their stifled independence: velleities give way to keen yearnings, desires twist toward violence. 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. April 2021 Micro-Reviews, Amanda Auerbach Motoyas is the perfect book for the reader whos seen it allwho is tired of predicting endings and hankers for a surprise. Why dont you try a different game? Id ask, but hedonly say, I like this one.. Then you can buy even more land.. by Yukiko Motoya ; translated by . 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. 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. Unlike the alienation other characters face within the context of relationships, she is literally all alone, but this only strengthens her sense of self. 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. And like so many arbitrary signifiers of taste, style, or quality, they are focused exclusively on a western tradition. I took a mouthful of grilled eel seasoned with plenty of sansho pepper. Do you think hes too immature? I wasexpecting some cutting-edge visual effects, but what I saw wasan image representing what looked like oceans and continents,drawn in simple lines like in old Nintendo games. Yukiko Motoya, trans. At the end of a story with an aesthetic solution, the narrative action is suspendedrather than resolvedand the author leaves the audience with a natural image that resists interpretation. When he notices that the fight has attracted her attention, he accuses her of lusting after the boxers and their muscled bodies. In The Women, a citys female population contracts a virus that turns them into homicidal hotties. [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). 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. 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). 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. 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 When I served him the peeled pear segments on a plate, thehusband-like creature excitedly reached for a cocktail stick. Its when Motoya is on the rocky terrain of collapsing relationships that her strangeness finds the friction it needs to stick." Translated by Asa Yoneda. His misperception becomes literal: he cant grasp whats right in front of him. In the realms of Motoya, believable behavior is more destructive and upsetting than any surreal occurrence. The Lonesome Bodybuilder Tomokos animosity toward her straw husband is as brief as it is startling. Maybe partly because of the TV feature, the late-afternoon deli counters were thronged with people. If youd like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. . I didn't like that story much at allit shouldn't have been in this collection. [1] As a child she read mystery stories by Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edogawa Ranpo, as well as horror manga. Her quickly buried feelings recall Sans mutating features. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. I was still thinking about the ex-wife following the refrigerator conversation. . Why was I so happy to be married to a bunch of straw?, she wonders to herself, before finally reassembling him. What are you doing on there? I peered over his shoulder. 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. Excitement becomes execution. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many users needs. Soft Skull Press. To Motoya, complacency is not only a violation of selfhood but also of fiction. I thought. Is that the problem? I asked. 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. 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. Its also the collections penultimate entry. It featured eel sourced from the Shimanto River, Lake Hamana,the Mikawa region, and Miyazaki Prefecture, grilled bothwith sauce and without. In the wonderful title story, the narrator returns from the grocery store to find her husband sitting on the couch, watching a boxing match. In the darkness, my husband swiftly removed my pajama bottoms. 2023 Cond Nast. The Lonesome Bodybuilder is made up of 10 short stories, some barely three or four pages long, and a novella, "An Exotic Marriage". the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. How could he even see straight? No one in Yukiko Motoyas new story collection, The Lonesome Bodybuilder, appears capable of seeing herself in the mirror. Even as The Lonesome Bodybuilder approaches its conclusion, new and winding pathways unfurl. The Aesthetics of Cosmic Feminism: A Review of Magda Crnecis FEM, Katherine M. Hedeen Motoya likes her fiction to swerve, not drift or meander, and she doesnt have patience for wandering. [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. $16.95. But Motoya belongs more to modern oddness than to a fabulist tradition. Snake ball! At face value, the stories are fun and funny to read, but weightier questions lurk below the surface. At face value, the stories are fun and funny to read, but weightier questions lurk below the surface. Claire Crews 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 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. [4] From 2005 to 2006 Motoya was the Friday host for Nippon Broadcasting System's late night radio show All Night Nippon. Japanese novelist, playwright, and theatre director, "Yukiko Motoya takes a satirical look at the 'Super No-Flat', "Yusho Takiguchi, Yukiko Motoya share Akutagawa Prize while Bumpei Aoyama wins Naoki Prize", " ", "From violence to vulnerability, Yukiko Motaya enchants with 'The Lonesome Bodybuilder', "Yukiko Motoya's Surreal World of Alienated Characters", "Husbands and Wives Magically Morph in a Japanese Story Collection", "The Lonesome Bodybuilder: Stories by Yukiko Motoya tales of the unexpected", "Presenter Interview: The Playwright's Center of Minneapolis", "53rd Kishida Kunio Drama Award goes to Ryuta Horai and Yukiko Motoya in a double awarding", "Why I Can No Longer Look at a Picnic Blanket Without Laughing", "The Reason I Carry Biscuits to Offer to Young Boys", "Alexandra Kleeman recommends "The Lonesome Bodybuilder" by Yukiko Motoya", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yukiko_Motoya&oldid=1122580502, Short description is different from Wikidata, Pages using embedded infobox templates with the title parameter, Articles containing Japanese-language text, Articles with Japanese-language sources (ja), Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, 2006 10th Tsuruya Nanboku Drama Award, Best Play category. Hey, do we have any more of those pears someone gave us theother day? On Pillar of Books by Moon Bo Young, Kyle Wang The story ends on a note of limitlessness: Anything at all could turn out to be something beyond my wildest dreams.. Her coach's admiration for bodybuilders suggests the reason she was drawn to it, even if she wasn't initially aware of it: 2019-2021 the complete review 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. (Picnic in the Storm) The husband-like thingpicked up the cocktail stick and popped a pear segment into themouth, which was positioned perilously close to his jawline. Authenticity is a reclamation project, and her characters go to great lengths to prove their agency. On The Atmospherians by Alex McElroy, Asa Drake The pears?. 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. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Youre accommodating, San, and before you know itshe breaks off, as Sans features rearrange themselves to mirror her partners. 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. She commits to it, lifting regularly and consuming protein powder, yet while others notice her transformation, her husband does not. Youknow, I think pears might be my favorite fruit, he announced. Her husbands features are always shifting on his face, and soon he resembles, variously, a monster, a snake, a new creature, his wife, and then, finally, a mountain peony. Wed found a table in the seating area of the department stores food hall. It settled to the floor in countless small clumps. Freed, he turns into a mountain peony. In a brilliant analogy, she compares marriage to a snake ball: There are two snakes, and they each start cannibalizing the other ones tail. Paper, $16.95. All this time, I had been feedingmyself to those men. One of the collections most active narrators is the curmudgeonly craftswoman at the center of The Dogs, the penultimate story. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure. If the reader has trouble picturing this, there is a cartoon diagram to assist. [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. [3][4] She founded her own theater company, called Gekidan Motoyo Yukiko (Motoya Yukiko Theater Company), in 2000, and began writing and staging her own plays. 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. 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. The narrator of An Exotic Marriage notices that she and her husband are beginning to look alike, but her husbands investment in game shows is the greater threat to her happiness and autonomy. I think thats the image I have of marriage. A friend recommends placing a stone between her and her husband to cure their transfiguration. On Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal, Lisa Hiton The title story is one of her best: "Fighters are so . Is a Woman Ever Going to Win the White House? 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. 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. 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. . And in The Dogs, the protagonist gains a sort of freedom, but this sunders threads both social and psychic; something ambiguously terrible rises in their place. My body was startingto coil, and I tried to stop thinking by closing my eyes even more tightly. You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. They operate, she writes, with a cripplingly limited understanding of what successful story structure is and is not, and what ought to feel satisfying. Their understandingsand ours, though we may try to resistare the products of cultural constructs, not natural laws. And so it is throughout: all these husbands are brutally banal in their ignorance, their apathies, and their cruelties. On The Curious Thing by Sandra Lim, Diana Whitney Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. Motoyas characters suffer from a deeper affliction than alienation; theyre often lost in relationships and attempting to carve out identities amid ambivalence. When you did that, I knew youd probably eat up my poop with a smile too.. [30], In 2013 Motoya married the poet, lyricist and film director Kite Okachimachi. Relationships often cause Motoyas characters to suffer a loss of identity. 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. 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. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. . 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. -, "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. Or: What really would have happened if Id gotten on the roller coaster that day? 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