Uwano again? "That Morning, When It", trans. 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?. 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. 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. . After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. Yukiko Motoya, trans. Arent you going to have any? the husband-like thing said. . Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the Settings & Account section. 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". While not explicitly feminist, her female protagonists share a capacity for small rebellions, sudden twitches against life-long habits of conformity. The Ductility of Person and Time in Saddiq Dzukogis Your Crib, My Qibla, Leslie Stonebraker He is villainous without even the dignity of intention. How could he even see straight? 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. THE LONESOME BODYBUILDER: STORIES by Yukiko Motoya, Tr. There is something pareidolic about the writing process. 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 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. In Yukiko Motoya's delightful new story collection, the familiar becomes unfamiliar. In The Straw Husband, the narrators husband is just that, straw, but his composition is less concerning than his inordinate devotion to his car. Do you think hes still getting them? [6][7], In 2002, prompted by a magazine editor's invitation, Motoya made her fiction debut with the short story Eriko to zettai (Eriko and Absolutely). We use 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. In so many of these stories, possibilities stretch, and the abandonment of realism feels like having your eyes wrenched open. I carefully took a piece of each and placedthem on top of Hakones rice. Like that actress from the movies., How did he split up with a person like that and end up marrying you?. Soft Skull Press. 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. How History Claims Us: On Made to Explode by Sandra Beasley, Aumaine Rose Smith Motoya wins over her audience by pushing the absurd to extremes. (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 is a writer, playwright, and stage director. The Grandfather of New Nature Writing Was a Bird-Loving Poet. Didnt that explain why I didnt much mind whether it was a husbandI was living with or something only resembling a husband? Empire Gold : A Review of Claire Meuschkes UPEND, John Wall Barger What are you doing on there? I peered over his shoulder. Hey, do we have any more of those pears someone gave us theother day? I was secretly impressed by Hakones story. By then I was actively feeding my bodyto him to be devoured. Each of these titles represents an energizing alternative to the ripped-apart illogic of our contemporary reality. Motoya locates a venerable sense of ancestry and inherited duty in the storys young market trader. March 2021 Micro-Reviews, Amy Hassinger (Several tales allude to Kwaidan, a ghoulish anthology compiled by the folklorist Lafcadio Hearn, in 1904.). The husband, San explains, waited until after their marriage to reveal the depths of his incuriosity. (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. New York, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2018. 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). In the wonderful title story, the narrator returns from the grocery store to find her husband sitting on the couch, watching a boxing match. How Climate-Change Fiction, or Cli-Fi, Forces Us to Confront the Incipient Death of the Planet. Her books have been published or are forthcoming in French, Norwegian, Spanish, and Chinese, . -, "Many of the stories, deftly translated by Asa Yoneda, are arresting with their strong female lead characters, starting with the mundane before venturing deep into the rabbit hole with surreal twists and turns. The Lonesome Bodybuilder is made up of 10 short stories, some barely three or four pages long, and a novella, "An Exotic Marriage". 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. Unlike the alienation other characters face within the context of relationships, she is literally all alone, but this only strengthens her sense of self. 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. He says his ex-wifes been sending him strange garbled emails recently, I said. Her husbands jealousy is another form of misperception. I didnt say what I was thinking, but he must have sensed it. These pastiches, parodies, and hauntings are all brilliantly translatedwith all their uncanny intactby Asa Yoneda. . On Places Ive Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown, Art Edwards Its saddermore bruisingthan a revenge fantasy. [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. 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. [4] From 2005 to 2006 Motoya was the Friday host for Nippon Broadcasting System's late night radio show All Night Nippon. [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. Longenbachs Forever, Noah Warren Take whatever form you want to be! The distending body of my husband exploded with a loud pop. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. In the opening story, a meek saleswoman whos taken up bodybuilding practices flexing, but drops the pose without having been able to look my mirror self in the eye. In another, a bored housewife notes that sometimes she looked in the mirror and was reminded of a blank postcard. Marriage, she concludes, has made her resemblance to paper even more notable than before. But I guess that cant be right. On Pillar of Books by Moon Bo Young, Kyle Wang MEDIA REVIEWS. 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. 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. Copyright 2018 by Yukiko Motoya. Her husband, who bears the brunt of these jabs, deserves it all (and more). Motoyas characters suffer from a deeper affliction than alienation; theyre often lost in relationships and attempting to carve out identities amid ambivalence. Youknow, I think pears might be my favorite fruit, he announced. No spam, we promise! . 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. 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. At face value, the stories are fun and funny to read, but weightier questions lurk below the surface. Our Final Words: A Review of Eternal Sentences by Michael McGriff, Katherine M. Hedeen She pushes her stories to surreal ends and cross-pollinates wry and solemn tones. As the strangeness mounts, San observes her identity as something willed and imposed. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. But she doesnt want the menshe wants the muscles. But too much open-mindedness and empathy can become a kind of permeability, and that gets these characters into trouble. Was that the fault of the soil, or did the problem lie in the roots? If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for $69 per month. There are two snakes, and they each start cannibalizing the other ones tail. Eine Hausfrau wird zur Bodybuilderin, aber ihrem arbeitsschtigen Ehemann fallen die neuen 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. English translation copyright 2018 by Asa Yoneda. "Why I Can No Longer Look at a Picnic Blanket Without Laughing", trans. Published in English by Soft Skull Press. A married couple begin to look like each other, and the wife wonders how she can prevent it. 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? I fled from thetinkling of coins falling and the suckling sound of him chewingon dried squid. . The answers to questions like that, for example. 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). 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. Number of pages: 224. Even the missteps attest to Motoyas fictive mandate: to be unburdened by rules and restraints. 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. 2023 Cond Nast. This is a game where you collect money?. Story Comes From Place: On Site Fidelity by Claire Boyles, Jasmine V. Bailey Maybe thats why its so easy being with you. The writing itself is to be admired. Uwano recommended this game, my husband said at last. For a full comparison of Standard and Premium Digital, click here. The Kenyon Review is supported in part by The National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. The ride can be anxious but never dull. 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. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Didnt you say his ex-wife wasreally good-looking?, Really good-looking. Relationships often cause Motoyas characters to suffer a loss of identity. 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 ! Motoyas prose is earnest and casual, as if the writer is trying to convince a friend of a persistent but invisible pest. Or: Weeping, I swung at her head with a club Id taken off a man Id kicked to the ground? 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. 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