An insidious exchange of traits and gender stereotypes unfolds and the boundaries between the two characters become porous. 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. I was folding laundry on the living room floor. The unpredictable narratives pair with curious and compelling imagery to create a palpable and inexplicable sense of wonder. At other points, the couple are recast as ravenous snakes. Why was I so happy to be married to a bunch of straw?, she wonders to herself, before finally reassembling him. 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. Take whatever form you want to be! The distending body of my husband exploded with a loud pop. With frank sincerity, Motoya makes the exhausted clichs of marriage and intimacy literal, and thus, energetically strange. No, its not like that. "In Yukiko Motoya's delightful new story collection, the familiar becomes unfamiliar . [1] As a child she read mystery stories by Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edogawa Ranpo, as well as horror manga. Other women in the book pursue men who are made of straw or advise each other to marry bicycle saddles. The characters featured in them arent particularly good at intimacy, even if they live in close proximity to spouses, old friends, and co-workers. No one in Yukiko Motoya's new story collection, . When you did that, I knew youd probably eat up my poop with a smile too.. Nevertheless, she feels invisible because her husband never notices her. I thought. Snake ball, huh? I poked at a piece of grilled eel laid on the rice, and pictured a bright white ball covered in scales. 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. Arent you worried? But I guess that cant be right. Lingerie? Back to the gym she goes. After that, my husband took to tinkling the fake coins incessantly,everywherein the bath, on the toilet, even under thecovers. But it would have been suspicious for me to say no. Youd both be in trouble then,wouldnt you? Hakone said. Each of these titles represents an energizing alternative to the ripped-apart illogic of our contemporary reality. [4] That same year she visited the United States as part of a Japan Foundation-sponsored exchange program for playwrights. Motoya Yukiko, general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author. Motoya won the Noma Prize for New Writers for Warm Poison in 2011; the Kenzaburo Oe Prize for Picnic in the Storm in 2013 . 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. 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. the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. Small discs ofdifferent colors twinkled all across the map. Your email address will not be published. By emphasizing a characteristic nimbleness in Japanese storytelling, Mockett draws attention to these often-invisible constructs; she shows, using examples from a number of childrens stories, the ways in which the rigid archetypes that we learn to recognize as we grow upexpectations of character or plot; the solid demarcations of good or evilcan be blurred into something more delightfully nebulous than the western canon prepares us for. "Life's not worth living if you're not tending to the whims and demands of a high-maintenance lover!". 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. Then I felt skinslacken, and bodies start to yield, and then I could no longer tellwhose sensations I was feeling. "That Morning, When It", trans. Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group. I sat down on the couch and looked at the iPad screen. Go, Zoromi, go do it for her. He movedthe cat off the space beside him where shed been asleep, and beckoned to me. On If by Song by Marcia Karp, Brian Chander Wiora Although the stories are often funny, theyre not sarcastic or ironic, and Motoyas not really kidding. or 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. 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. All this time, I had been feedingmyself to those men. personalising content and ads, providing social media features and to Okay, I heard a muffled voice say. Her books have been published or are forthcoming in French, Norwegian, Spanish, and Chinese, . In the wonderful title story, the narrator returns from the grocery store to find her husband sitting on the couch, watching a boxing match. 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. The husband . 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 noticed myself acting as though that was who Id been all along, a chill went up my spine, she confesses. 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. On Deluge by Leila Chatti, Anne Graue Authenticity is a reclamation project, and her characters go to great lengths to prove their agency. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. Theres a Jungian undercurrent in Motoyas writing, which seems to prize self-actualization as a way to mendor endtroubled relationships. the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. On We Do Not Live in Vain by Selva Casal, Jessica Tanck 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. Longenbachs Forever, Noah Warren Yukiko Motoya's The Lonesome Bodybuilder is a refreshing reminder that fiction is an elastic medium, capable of stretching into new and surprising shapes. . By Yukiko Motoya. In Yukiko Motoya's delightful new story collection, the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Its remarkable ending urges one to reexamine the mysteries of the story: the uncanny dogs, the fine-drawn snowbound setting, the temporal ellipsesall those details that seem to delicately conceal the protagonists frayed psychology. Youknow, I think pears might be my favorite fruit, he announced. 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 weird garbled messages?, No, but you can just tell these things sometimes., Huh. [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. 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. . Arent you going to have any? the husband-like thing said. 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. 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. No one in Yukiko Motoyas new story collection, The Lonesome Bodybuilder, appears capable of seeing herself in the mirror. 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). And like so many arbitrary signifiers of taste, style, or quality, they are focused exclusively on a western tradition. 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. On Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing by Julie Marie Wade, Matt McBride The narrator is surprised, but not at the transformationshe just never knew he wanted that. His misperception becomes literal: he cant grasp whats right in front of him. Our Final Words: A Review of Eternal Sentences by Michael McGriff, Katherine M. Hedeen 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.. . . In "An Exotic Marriage," the collection's centerpiece, the narrator, Sen, marries a man who refuses to engage with the world. Wilson Josephson is a young sapling spreading his roots in southern Minnesota. Fun and funny . Reverberations and Divinations in Kazim Alis The Voice of Sheila Chandra, Peter Campion Standard Digital includes access to a wealth of global news, analysis and expert opinion. . Her only companionship comes from a pack of mysterious dogs that, unbeknownst to her, terrorize the nearby village until there is no one left. Some changes render you, paradoxically, more yourself. Nov. 2018. 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. His face was barely maintaining a form that could even berecognized as human. 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. 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. When I served him the peeled pear segments on a plate, thehusband-like creature excitedly reached for a cocktail stick. On Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal, Lisa Hiton Used with permission of Soft Skull Press. Both women, at the service of their partners desires, are reshaped by othersan easy way to become a stranger to yourself in Motoyas world. These men are usually husbands, as in the eponymous story that opens the collection, in which the protagonist discovers bodybuilding, becomes enamored with it to the point of obsession, and rapidly transforms both her body and her personality. In the title story, a husband watches a boxing match and asks his wife what she thinks of his body. [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. "), and dedicates herself to it, with considerable success. Facial features intermittently disassemble, prompting Sans panic. I was secretly impressed by Hakones story. Motoya wins over her audience by pushing the absurd to extremes. Her quickly buried feelings recall Sans mutating features. That only made the boundary between the skin of ourentwined bodies even hazier. The pears?. $16.95. On The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy, Peter Campion Its when Motoya is on the rocky terrain of collapsing relationships that her strangeness finds the friction it needs to stick." The title story is one of her best: "Fighters are so . The reader wonders: Am I the strange one? Translated by Asa Yoneda. [27][28] Starting in 2014 she was a regular host for Season 4 of the TBS Radio program "The Top 5". Motoyas characters suffer from a deeper affliction than alienation; theyre often lost in relationships and attempting to carve out identities amid ambivalence. 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. Tomokos animosity toward her straw husband is as brief as it is startling. Delightful . April 2021 Micro-Reviews, Amanda Auerbach From Apocalypse to Apocalypso: On An Ecotopian Lexicon, Ryan Lackey I have the feeling I would have met a version of myself I dont know now? 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. The mass movement of a migrating flock of . I was still thinking about the ex-wife following the refrigerator conversation. San isnt the only woman in Motoyas stories who feels neglected and vaguely undefined. The ride can be anxious but never dull. Blurring the Obvious: Bluebeards First Wife by Ha Seong-Nan, Christopher R. Vaughan 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. Do you remember, on our honeymoon, how I chewed up allthe fruit for you so you could eat it?, Sure. Eine Hausfrau wird zur Bodybuilderin, aber ihrem arbeitsschtigen Ehemann fallen die neuen (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. 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 Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. She is typical of Motoyas women: conferring an excess of personhood on whomever or whatever is at hand, yearning to connect to something that isnt there. 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. The women in these stories find themselves with bad mennot malicious or violent, but complacent, uninteresting, and undeserving of their partners. 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. My husband seemed anxious to make a snake ball with me. [5] It became the title story of a 2003 collection published by Kodansha. By then I was actively feeding my bodyto him to be devoured. 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. What are you doing on there? I peered over his shoulder. Yukiko Motoya so commented on her career and creative process during an interview for Granta. Fun and funny . Wed found a table in the seating area of the department stores food hall. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. 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