I took a mouthful of grilled eel seasoned with plenty of sansho pepper. They confront their stifled independence: velleities give way to keen yearnings, desires twist toward violence. 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). Youre talking about him a lot lately., Thats exactly what I told Uwano. 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. Excitement becomes execution. One of the collections most active narrators is the curmudgeonly craftswoman at the center of The Dogs, the penultimate story. As the strangeness mounts, San observes her identity as something willed and imposed. I sat down on the couch and looked at the iPad screen. The Aesthetics of Cosmic Feminism: A Review of Magda Crnecis FEM, Katherine M. Hedeen Motoyas prose advances a similar principle. It featured eel sourced from the Shimanto River, Lake Hamana,the Mikawa region, and Miyazaki Prefecture, grilled bothwith sauce and without. He is villainous without even the dignity of intention. Hakone, are youand Senta thinking about getting married yet? I asked, getting a light blouse out of my bag. Motoyas women exist most vividly in their own heads, a state of being that often leaves them feeling alone in a crowd. . He currently lives in Washington, DC. Do you know the story of the snake ball? 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. 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). Even as The Lonesome Bodybuilder approaches its conclusion, new and winding pathways unfurl. I gave up and cleared the table andwent for a bath, but when I came back, my husband hadnt moved. Previously, her translated stories have appeared in GRANTA and CATAPULT . There are two snakes, and they each start cannibalizing the other ones tail. Do you think hes still getting them? 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. If youd like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. The unsettling stories in The Lonesome Bodybuilder are deeply preoccupied with the yawning disconnect between people. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. 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. Left to their own devices, these characters may have been content with the status quo, but the universe Motoya builds taunts them with their secret motivations until theyre forced to confront them publicly. Im not sure why. In Front of Strangers I Sing: The Strange Intimacy of Paul Celan, Benjamin Hedin That entreatyTake whatever form you want to be!might as well be Motoya imploring writers to make fiction pop and burst, to send it rolling out of the boutique and down the hill, curtain flapping. I was still thinking about the ex-wife following the refrigerator conversation. What if thereends up being more of the bad? A married couple begin to look like each other, and the wife wonders how she can prevent it. The titular bodybuilder lives what seems to be a structured, self-contained life (I decide who I am, and never consider other possibilities); bodybuilding is an exciting new discovery that expands her world. Blurring the Obvious: Bluebeards First Wife by Ha Seong-Nan, Christopher R. Vaughan 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 . . From Apocalypse to Apocalypso: On An Ecotopian Lexicon, Ryan Lackey 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. the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. . 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. The husband-like thingpicked up the cocktail stick and popped a pear segment into themouth, which was positioned perilously close to his jawline. Her husband, who bears the brunt of these jabs, deserves it all (and more). The other persons ideas, interests, andhabits would gradually take the place of my own. This is abundantly illustrated in An Exotic Marriage, a novella about a woman, San, who begins to fear that her husbands identity is blending with her own. 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. analyse how our Sites are used. I thought. 2023 Cond Nast. The story ends on a note of limitlessness: Anything at all could turn out to be something beyond my wildest dreams.. Hakone swiftly referred to the floor guide and said, This way, and took off without sparing a glance at the stalls she passed. 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. 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. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the Settings & Account section. The answers to questions like that, for example. Ikiteru dake de ai was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize,[9] and was later adapted into a 2018 film of the same name. A sales associate at a boutique stays overnight digging up outfits for someoneor somethingthat wont leave the dressing room. He says his ex-wifes been sending him strange garbled emails recently, I said. Do you remember, on our honeymoon, how I chewed up allthe fruit for you so you could eat it?, Sure. In these contexts, Motoyas characters come to recognize the possibilities theyve denied themselves. One woman tries to compensate for her husbands lack of confidence by listing all my own faults. A second character, an executive, wishes to speak her mind at a meeting but fears that she hasnt established herself among her colleagues as the kind of person who could say that sort of thing. The tales boil down to the problem of balancing empathy with self-assertionof both practicing kindness and expressing your own needs, and all while the people around you are behaving like wraiths or aliens. . 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. But I guess that cant be right. There was no response. 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. Even as The Lonesome Bodybuilder approaches its conclusion, new and winding pathways unfurl. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. -, "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. I remembered that once, many years ago, Id asked Santa Claus for a present: to wake up and have the whole world to myself, she recalls as she wanders the ghost town. The pears?. Her quickly buried feelings recall Sans mutating features. Like the work of Aimee Bender and Robert Walser, many of these stories, however whimsical on the surface, possess a sense of dread at their core. 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 [4] From 2005 to 2006 Motoya was the Friday host for Nippon Broadcasting System's late night radio show All Night Nippon. [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. I thought perhaps the gamegot more interesting the longer you played, but whenever I lookedover my husbands shoulder, the screen always looked the same. "That Morning, When It", trans. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. Fun and funny . The positioning of his features was deteriorating faster thanever. Strangely, too, the men Id been with had all wanted me to grow in them. Many of the characters seek lives yet unlived, or lives once lived but later forgotten. 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. While not explicitly feminist, her female protagonists share a capacity for small rebellions, sudden twitches against life-long habits of conformity. English translation copyright 2018 by Asa Yoneda. 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. The women in these stories find themselves with bad mennot malicious or violent, but complacent, uninteresting, and undeserving of their partners. Hey, do we have any more of those pears someone gave us theother day? Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs. 224 pp. Standard Digital includes access to a wealth of global news, analysis and expert opinion. In the darkness, my husband swiftly removed my pajama bottoms. 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 . But I guess that cant be right. On If by Song by Marcia Karp, Brian Chander Wiora On Stardust Media by Christina Pugh, Jehanne Dubrow The ride can be anxious but never dull. Yukiko Motoya, trans. 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 . 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. . Soft Skull Press. 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 I think?. Unearthing Memory and Reclaiming the Feminine in Shanta Lee Ganders GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA, Chris Via Claire Crews How Climate-Change Fiction, or Cli-Fi, Forces Us to Confront the Incipient Death of the Planet. On The Curious Thing by Sandra Lim, Diana Whitney can lose themselves to mundanity and wrestle to reclaim their selfhood is best illustrated in the novella-length "An Exotic Marriage . The Lake Hamana eel was firmer and more succulent than the one from the Mikawa region. Theres a Jungian undercurrent in Motoyas writing, which seems to prize self-actualization as a way to mendor endtroubled relationships. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. Motoya's stories tend to include a few odd details and features -- often contrasting with the seeming normality of the narration, a mix of the absurd and matter-of-fact mundane. ISBN: 9781472154354. No, I said. Its also the collections penultimate entry. 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. 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. As if to prove it, I could hardly recall the men Id been with before. But too much open-mindedness and empathy can become a kind of permeability, and that gets these characters into trouble. Yukiko Motoyas The Lonesome Bodybuilder is available from Soft Skull Press. . Other women in the book pursue men who are made of straw or advise each other to marry bicycle saddles. The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya (2018). I didn't like that story much at allit shouldn't have been in this collection. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many users needs. Motoya locates a venerable sense of ancestry and inherited duty in the storys young market trader. [5] It became the title story of a 2003 collection published by Kodansha. personalising content and ads, providing social media features and to What are you doing on there? I peered over his shoulder. Check if your Normally he was never this insistent. . Didnt you say his ex-wife wasreally good-looking?, Really good-looking. But after four years, I hadnttried to escape from the soil that was my husband. She becomes the bulge in the curtain, the shadow on the other side of the glassthe strange one. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. 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. How could he even see straight? We use Eventually, the clerk has no option except to haul the fitting room out of the store. Near But Not Touching: On The Naomi Letters by Rachel Mennies, Tracy Zeman Read 734 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. 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. These pastiches, parodies, and hauntings are all brilliantly translatedwith all their uncanny intactby Asa Yoneda. When the pair suffers their first fight, Tomokos husband collapseshis straw limbs crumble at her feetand she fantasizes about setting him on fire. Motoyas is the perfect book for the reader whos seen it allwho is tired of predicting endings and hankers for a surprise. The fact that I couldnt stop, even if I tried, was proof that it wasnt actually a matter of anything as benign as acting or pretending.. [2] After completing high school, Motoya moved to Tokyo to study acting, and won a voice acting role in the Hideaki Anno anime adaptation of Kare Kano, but switched her focus to writing after a teacher praised a short play Motoya wrote for the school's graduation ceremony. 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. Do you think hes too immature? By suggesting the need for a shield within marriage, Motoya conveys the dysfunction she sees in the coexistence of men and women. 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. [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. Motoya won the Noma Prize for New Writers for Warm Poison in 2011; the Kenzaburo Oe Prize for Picnic in the Storm in 2013 . She pushes her stories to surreal ends and cross-pollinates wry and solemn tones. Her books have . [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. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. 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. Instead of responding, I looked down and nibbled a slice of pear. 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. Some changes render you, paradoxically, more yourself. [21] Nilanjana Roy, in her review for the Financial Times, concluded that "Yukiko Motoyas shivery, murmuring voice will never completely leave you". . In Yukiko Motoyas delightful new story collection, the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Margaryta Golovchenko. and other data for a number of reasons, such as keeping FT Sites reliable and secure, . It seemed that all he was doing was almost robotically placing hisfinger on the discs. 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. In The Lonesome Bodybuilder, the pest is always a yawning disconnect between people. 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. [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". Authenticity is a reclamation project, and her characters go to great lengths to prove their agency. 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. Every time I got together with someone new, I got replanted, and the nutrients from the old soil disappeared without a trace. Mud Stuck to our Shoes: On The Insistence of Harm by Fernando Valverde, Edward Derby Small discs ofdifferent colors twinkled all across the map. We support credit card, debit card and PayPal payments. by 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 How to Burden the Girl, a thirty-four-year-old recluse spies on the younger woman who has moved in next door. To Motoya, complacency is not only a violation of selfhood but also of fiction. I didnt let myself be bound by anything as common as common senseonly to be rewarded with surreal proof that her eyes had not deceived her. 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. MEDIA REVIEWS. 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