They treat the importance of others inner lives as a given. 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. Banners positioned around the floor advertised the Beat the Heat Bento Expo. 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. I think?. [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. You must be concerned, said Hakone, sounding anything but as she took a pair of disposable chopsticks out of their packet. In Yukiko Motoya's delightful new story collection, the familiar becomes unfamiliar. 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. At other points, the couple are recast as ravenous snakes. In The Women, a citys female population contracts a virus that turns them into homicidal hotties. Motoya 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 Yukio 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.--This text refers to the mp3_cd edition. 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. Youve banked some money., Sure enough, there was a number at the lower-right-hand corner of the screen. In The Lonesome Bodybuilder, the pest is always a yawning disconnect between people. . 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 . Michael Staley. Asa Yoneda. The husband-like thingpicked up the cocktail stick and popped a pear segment into themouth, which was positioned perilously close to his jawline. She becomes the bulge in the curtain, the shadow on the other side of the glassthe strange one. Relationships often cause Motoyas characters to suffer a loss of identity. The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya / Soft Skull Press / 224 pages / 978-1593766788 / 2018. It also indicates the range of Motoyas storytelling style by unveiling additional powers of suggestion and atmospheric description. The books 11 tales are, in one way or another, about the fettering of freedom. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. Asa Yoneda, This page was last edited on 18 November 2022, at 09:31. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. 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. 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. His face was barely maintaining a form that could even berecognized as human. and then the short story "The Exotic Marriage" is a whopping eighty five pages long. At the story's beginning, he seems like a . 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. [9] She was nominated a third time for her 2011 novel Nurui doku (Warm Poison), about a woman who has a relationship with a pathological liar claiming to be a former high school classmate. 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. Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Translated by Asa Yoneda. The weird garbled messages?, No, but you can just tell these things sometimes., Huh. She pushes her stories to surreal ends and cross-pollinates wry and solemn tones. On A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill, Nicholas Bredie I sat down on the couch and looked at the iPad screen. 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? No one in Yukiko Motoyas new story collection, The Lonesome Bodybuilder, appears capable of seeing herself in the mirror. The collections longest story, An Exotic Marriage, is more of a novella, and explores physical transformation as a metaphor for the shifting of identities in a relationship. One of the collections most active narrators is the curmudgeonly craftswoman at the center of The Dogs, the penultimate story. When I sat down next to him, the husband-like thing pickedup the TV remote and started flipping through channels. . . (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 books have . Translated by Asa Yoneda. Every time I noticed myself acting as though that was who Id been all along, a chill went up my spine, she confesses. Then you can buy even more land.. Hearing Hakonessnake-ball story, I finally felt that something that had beencloudy to me had become clear. You don't always know what you're getting into when you pick up a book. 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). 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. Many of the characters seek lives yet unlived, or lives once lived but later forgotten. The story ends on a note of limitlessness: Anything at all could turn out to be something beyond my wildest dreams.. [30], In 2013 Motoya married the poet, lyricist and film director Kite Okachimachi. Husbands and Wives Magically Morph in a Japanese Story Collection, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/21/books/review/lonesome-bodybuilder-yukiko-motoya.html. No, its not like that. I was folding laundry on the living room floor. Many highlight the intense and uncomfortable strangeness of having a body that can change so much and so often; most feature narrators that are terminally placid in the face of escalating terror; and almost every story includes at least one truly terrible man. 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. 209 pages. But what was soappealing about the insipid map that looked like a stage backdropand its ever-twinkling coins? No one in Yukiko Motoya's new story collection, . 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. In The Straw Husband, the narrators husband is just that, straw, but his composition is less concerning than his inordinate devotion to his car. The husband . The question of why she reassembles him looms large, and implies a sort of complicity in misery, an experience common among Motoyas characters. . It seemed that all he was doing was almost robotically placing hisfinger on the discs. 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. There seems to be an essential despair of heterosexual partnership in these storiesnot that they suggest that a just and joyful partnership is an impossibility! Why was I so happy to be married to a bunch of straw?, she wonders to herself, before finally reassembling him. But too much open-mindedness and empathy can become a kind of permeability, and that gets these characters into trouble. 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. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. Yukiko Motoyas The Lonesome Bodybuilder is a refreshing reminder that fiction is an elastic medium, capable of stretching into new and surprising shapes. Then I felt skinslacken, and bodies start to yield, and then I could no longer tellwhose sensations I was feeling. THE LONESOME BODYBUILDER: STORIES by Yukiko Motoya, Tr. On Memorial Drive: A Daughters Memoir by Natasha Trethewey, John Wall Barger One woman puts it to her husband directly: You can stop being husband shaped now! But Motoya's unique vision is still worth experiencing, and Yoneda's translation provides a clear and beautiful . We use Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. The complete review's Review: . Yukiko Motoya's imagination is wild and rich in her eleven whimsical short stories in this book. Characters change; literally, their facial features move, morph, disappear. Normally he was never this insistent. [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. 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. What happens then?, Yeah. Yeah. My husband nodded while sucking on a strip of dried squid. Idplanned to just wait for her, but I saw a banner for the SpecialSelection Four-Eel Taste Test Bento and was tempted into gettingone. The Lake Hamana eel was firmer and more succulent than the one from the Mikawa region. Blurring the Obvious: Bluebeards First Wife by Ha Seong-Nan, Christopher R. Vaughan The husband, San explains, waited until after their marriage to reveal the depths of his incuriosity. Unlike the alienation other characters face within the context of relationships, she is literally all alone, but this only strengthens her sense of self. 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. But it only applies when the snakes consume each other at the same rate. . Okay, I heard a muffled voice say. I think thats the image I have of marriage. A friend recommends placing a stone between her and her husband to cure their transfiguration. [27][28] Starting in 2014 she was a regular host for Season 4 of the TBS Radio program "The Top 5". What if thereends up being more of the bad? Wilson Josephson is a young sapling spreading his roots in southern Minnesota. Youre talking about him a lot lately., Thats exactly what I told Uwano. I always do that, she admonishes herself. Yukiko Motoya, trans. "Life's not worth living if you're not tending to the whims and demands of a high-maintenance lover!". The Kenyon Review is supported in part by The National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. In the title story, a husband watches a boxing match and asks his wife what she thinks of his body. The author reaches, with language, toward a reader who may or may not be there. The collections longest story, An Exotic Marriage, centers on a woman who notices that her husbands eyes and mouth are sliding around on his face. 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. 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. Ad Choices. Hakone quenched her thirst with cold roasted green tea from the vending machine. . Its when Motoya is on the rocky terrain of collapsing relationships that her strangeness finds the friction it needs to stick." How She Learned to Love Herself in 2014; and Japan's most prestigious literary prize, the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. While not explicitly feminist, her female protagonists share a capacity for small rebellions, sudden twitches against life-long habits of conformity. I fled from thetinkling of coins falling and the suckling sound of him chewingon dried squid. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. Look at the bottom of the screen. Hakone, are youand Senta thinking about getting married yet? I asked, getting a light blouse out of my bag. Snake ball, huh? I poked at a piece of grilled eel laid on the rice, and pictured a bright white ball covered in scales. Published in English by Soft Skull Press. Motoya likes her fiction to swerve, not drift or meander, and she doesnt have patience for wandering. Motoya Yukiko, general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author. 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. Poems That Linger: Peter Campions One Summer Evening at the Falls, Johannes Gransson The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Motoyas protagonists feel quietly radical in a literary moment that seems particularly interested in unpacking various forms of narcissism. . The same goes for San, whose face melts into new patterns. Oh, those, my husband said, turning his shoulders towardme. Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group. Claire Crews You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Previously, her translated stories have appeared in GRANTA and CATAPULT . analyse how our Sites are used. offers FT membership to read for free. In spite ofin fact, because ofher affection for the odd and comic, Motoyas stories grant sobering insights into the compromises of love and marriage, the fraught pursuit of art and desire, and the dangers of becoming stuck in the wrong version of your life. [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. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many users needs. San isnt the only woman in Motoyas stories who feels neglected and vaguely undefined. The Women makes the battle of the sexes literal, too, as women turn into garish embodiments of male desirebut stronger and deadlier. August 2021 Micro-Reviews, Christina Pugh In the realms of Motoya, believable behavior is more destructive and upsetting than any surreal occurrence. . 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. The title story is one of her best: "Fighters are so . Soft Skull Press. No, I said. Her quickly buried feelings recall Sans mutating features. 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. the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. 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. This really takes me back. On the screen, a quiz show was posing a question about an ad that had been on heavy rotation just after wed gotten married. 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 Motoya, complacency is not only a violation of selfhood but also of fiction. In Fitting Room, a saleswoman attends day and night to a mysterious customer who refuses to leave a fitting room. 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. Didnt that explain why I didnt much mind whether it was a husbandI was living with or something only resembling a husband? [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). 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