Asa Yoneda. 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. Her eyes were focused on the booths cloud-glass partition, but her mouth was still chewing away steadily at the steak. In the realms of Motoya, believable behavior is more destructive and upsetting than any surreal occurrence. Yukiko Motoya ( , Motoya Yukiko, born July 14, 1979) is a Japanese novelist, playwright, theatre director, and former voice actress. The characters featured in them arent particularly good at intimacy, even if they live in close proximity to spouses, old friends, and co-workers. The Dogs avoids such risks by dint of its elusiveness and subtlety. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. 224 pp. Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. Maybe I should have gone for that one too, I said enviously,looking into Hakones bento box as I took the rubber band off my own. I carefully took a piece of each and placedthem on top of Hakones rice. 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. 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.. Or: Weeping, I swung at her head with a club Id taken off a man Id kicked to the ground? [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. Translated by Asa Yoneda. I fled from thetinkling of coins falling and the suckling sound of him chewingon dried squid. Uwano again? Banners positioned around the floor advertised the Beat the Heat Bento Expo. "Life's not worth living if you're not tending to the whims and demands of a high-maintenance lover!". . [25] A film adaptation of Ranb to taiki (Vengeance Can Wait), directed by Masanori Tominaga and starring Tadanobu Asano, Minami Hinase, and Eiko Koike, premiered in Japan the next year. 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). Asa Yoneda. And like so many arbitrary signifiers of taste, style, or quality, they are focused exclusively on a western tradition. 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 . 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 . She comes to have a community of people who support her, and her bulging musclesher arms looked huge enough to snap a log in halfearn her a following at the natural-beauty store where she works. Remember?. You can have two slices of my steak if you give me some ofyour eel.. 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. No spam, we promise! Standard Digital includes access to a wealth of global news, analysis and expert opinion. Where does Motoya find lines like When I woke up and looked in the mirror, I saw that my face had finally begun to forget who I was? I wasnt sure that I wanted to. 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. Walker Rutter-Bowman received his MFA from Syracuse University. 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. You should be careful, her neighbor tells her. The wife tries her best to boost his ego, fails, then decides to take up bodybuilding. What if thereends up being more of the bad? Previously, her translated stories have appeared in GRANTA and CATAPULT . Both women, at the service of their partners desires, are reshaped by othersan easy way to become a stranger to yourself in Motoyas world. And so it is throughout: all these husbands are brutally banal in their ignorance, their apathies, and their cruelties. 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. Every time I would ask, You really enjoy itthat much? hed say, Thats not what its about, in a curiously languid tone. While not explicitly feminist, her female protagonists share a capacity for small rebellions, sudden twitches against life-long habits of conformity. 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. [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. Motoyas characters suffer from a deeper affliction than alienation; theyre often lost in relationships and attempting to carve out identities amid ambivalence. I guessed hemust be feeling needy. John Scioli, the owner of the Community Bookstore, in Brooklyn, prepares to shutter a neighborhood institution. 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. personalising content and ads, providing social media features and to Strangely, too, the men Id been with had all wanted me to grow in them. 209 pages. (Picnic in the Storm) 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. Each time I looked at my husband lying on the couchshe thinks to herselfI had the strange impression I was living with a new kind of organism that would die if it exerted itself in any way. His laziness alarms her more than the migration of his features to new regions of his face. The answers to questions like that, for example. Between me and Senta, I mightend up swallowing him all in one big gulp.. [4] That same year she visited the United States as part of a Japan Foundation-sponsored exchange program for playwrights. 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. What happens then?, Yeah. Every time I got together with someone new, I got replanted, and the nutrients from the old soil disappeared without a trace. [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. . . Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. English translation copyright 2018 by Asa Yoneda. In the title story, a husband watches a boxing match and asks his wife what she thinks of his body. I have the feeling I would have met a version of myself I dont know now? One of Mocketts main foci is an introduction to Hayao Kawais suggestion of an aesthetic solution common in Japanese literature. Translated by Asa Yoneda. How She Learned to Love Herself in 2014; and Japan's most prestigious literary prize, the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. Mud Stuck to our Shoes: On The Insistence of Harm by Fernando Valverde, Edward Derby On Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing by Julie Marie Wade, Matt McBride Her novel Funuke domo kanashimi no ai o misero (Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers!) Hakone swiftly referred to the floor guide and said, This way, and took off without sparing a glance at the stalls she passed. The course of that career certainly indicates a restless curiosity. I was still thinking about the ex-wife following the refrigerator conversation. or On The Curious Thing by Sandra Lim, Diana Whitney The weird garbled messages?, No, but you can just tell these things sometimes., Huh. In Fitting Room, a saleswoman attends day and night to a mysterious customer who refuses to leave a fitting room. Facial features intermittently disassemble, prompting Sans panic. (That may be an additional appeal of the gym: in a precarious world, a weight lifter looks exactly like what she is.) All rights reserved. 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. 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. 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. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group. The Lake Hamana eel was firmer and more succulent than the one from the Mikawa region. A married couple begin to look like each other, and the wife wonders how she can prevent it. So I ordered a fruit platter from room service, and chewed it all up and spat it out onto the plate, and gave it to you., The husband-like thingsvoice sounded indistinct, as if it were coming from behind a wall of water. 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). 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. Check if your 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. Theres a Jungian undercurrent in Motoyas writing, which seems to prize self-actualization as a way to mendor endtroubled relationships. It seemed that all he was doing was almost robotically placing hisfinger on the discs. "), and dedicates herself to it, with considerable success. Empire Gold : A Review of Claire Meuschkes UPEND, John Wall Barger (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. 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. This is a game where you collect money?. The husband-like thingpicked up the cocktail stick and popped a pear segment into themouth, which was positioned perilously close to his jawline. 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 ! Unearthing Memory and Reclaiming the Feminine in Shanta Lee Ganders GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA, Chris Via 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.. By Yukiko Motoya. From The Lonesome Bodybuilder. Marie Mockett takes umbrage, in her excellent Lit Hub essay Our Fairy Tales, Ourselves, with critics and philosophers whose pursuit of universal laws of narrative structure blind them to the expansive possibilities of literature. This normalization gives the stories their irony and their sense of being just a bit off, like a lingering scent of formaldehyde. 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. Lingerie? Back to the gym she goes. . [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. On The Nightfields by Joanna Klink, Patrick Davis Wilson Josephson is a young sapling spreading his roots in southern Minnesota. The Aesthetics of Cosmic Feminism: A Review of Magda Crnecis FEM, Katherine M. Hedeen No one in Yukiko Motoyas new story collection, The Lonesome Bodybuilder, appears capable of seeing herself in the mirror. My husband seemed anxious to make a snake ball with me. I heard a tinkling sound like coins dropping into a piggy bank, which Id been hearing constantly all evening. 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. On The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy, Peter Campion Her books have been published or are forthcoming in French, Norwegian, Spanish, and Chinese, . . I wonder. What would you think if you saw his true form? As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Characters change; literally, their facial features move, morph, disappear. -, "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 by Yukiko Motoya / Soft Skull Press / 224 pages / 978-1593766788 / 2018. On Places Ive Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown, Art Edwards The other stories are trim and propulsive, itching to move forward, using their surreal elements to interrogate assumptions about intimacy and the complacency of partnership. On Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal, Lisa Hiton Do you think hes too immature? A sales associate at a boutique stays overnight digging up outfits for someoneor somethingthat wont leave the dressing room. But too much open-mindedness and empathy can become a kind of permeability, and that gets these characters into trouble. Her first story, ""Eriko to zettai,"" appeared in the literary magazine Gunzo in 2002. Motoyas prose is earnest and casual, as if the writer is trying to convince a friend of a persistent but invisible pest. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. Tomokos animosity toward her straw husband is as brief as it is startling. I was folding laundry on the living room floor. Whenever Id gotten close to someone in the past, Id had the feeling that little by little I was being replaced. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. 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. 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 finished towel-dryingmy hair and stepped out onto the balcony to bring in the laundryId hung out that afternoon. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. Maybe partly because of the TV feature, the late-afternoon deli counters were thronged with people. I waited for something else to happen, but that was it. Story Comes From Place: On Site Fidelity by Claire Boyles, Jasmine V. Bailey Maybe I dont really know, myself. Her husbands jealousy is another form of misperception. His misperception becomes literal: he cant grasp whats right in front of him. One of the collections most active narrators is the curmudgeonly craftswoman at the center of The Dogs, the penultimate story. 224 pp. How could he even see straight? But it only applies when the snakes consume each other at the same rate. by Relationships often cause Motoyas characters to suffer a loss of identity. Ad Choices. $16.95. On Stardust Media by Christina Pugh, Jehanne Dubrow Although the stories are often funny, theyre not sarcastic or ironic, and Motoyas not really kidding. Her husband, who bears the brunt of these jabs, deserves it all (and more). I think?. Why was I so happy to be married to a bunch of straw?, she wonders to herself, before finally reassembling him. Even as The Lonesome Bodybuilder approaches its conclusion, new and winding pathways unfurl. But Motoya belongs more to modern oddness than to a fabulist tradition. Youd both be in trouble then,wouldnt you? Hakone said. 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. and other data for a number of reasons, such as keeping FT Sites reliable and secure, Motoya was born in Hakusan, Ishikawa. . No, I said. 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. 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. On Asylum by Jill Bialosky, Jehanne Dubrow THE LONESOME BODYBUILDER By Yukiko Motoya Translated by Asa Yoneda 224 pp. Certainly the style will remind readers of the Japanese authors Banana Yoshimoto and Sayaka Murata, but the stories themselves and the logic, or lack thereof, within their sentences are reminiscent, at least to this reader, of Joy Williams and Rivka Galchen and George Saunders. Motoyas prose advances a similar principle. How could he even see straight? (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.) So, for example, in the (US-)title story the narrator is inspired to take up bodybuilding, sculpting her body through intense exercise, after catching a boxing match her husband was watching on TV. Motoya Yukiko, general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author. 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. As a leashed man miserably admits, just before being yanked to mortal combat, This is all because of the desires of men like us. Such a desire, for a more exciting lover, has exciting effects: the women demand duels, then take their husbands and boyfriends down by the river to kill them. 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. In these contexts, Motoyas characters come to recognize the possibilities theyve denied themselves. Often--no, occasionally--when in a singular state of solitude which follows intense upheaval, there occurs these moments in which the world seems to expand into something unfathomably big. She has glimmering pink hair, shes an unstoppable ninja, she fights bad guys in the garden every day. 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 served him the peeled pear segments on a plate, thehusband-like creature excitedly reached for a cocktail stick. Hakone quenched her thirst with cold roasted green tea from the vending machine. 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. 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! You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. 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. Motoyas emphases include tedious relationships, workplace gender dynamics, and the soporific entertainments and culinary distractions of our modern age. 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. Her books have been published or are forthcoming in French, Norwegian, Spanish, and Chinese, . The stories are funny and creepy; they have a campfire vibe, a brush of the moonless night. Asa Yoneda. This sense of unpredictability traverses the entire collection, and yet the stories rarely seem desultory. 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. 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Idplanned to just wait for her, but I saw a banner for the SpecialSelection Four-Eel Taste Test Bento and was tempted into gettingone. At the story's beginning, he seems like a . 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. 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. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure. Even the missteps attest to Motoyas fictive mandate: to be unburdened by rules and restraints. I thought perhaps the gamegot more interesting the longer you played, but whenever I lookedover my husbands shoulder, the screen always looked the same. organisation The Ductility of Person and Time in Saddiq Dzukogis Your Crib, My Qibla, Leslie Stonebraker He pulled the strip of squid from his mouth, and said, Itsbecause youre a housewife, San. For instance, in Fitting Room, a boutique employee, faced with a customer who wont leave the changing room, remembers that the fitting rooms were moveable, on wheels. Motoya wastes no time: the employee wheels the fitting room and customer out of the shop. You should be careful, her translated stories have appeared in GRANTA and CATAPULT machine! New regions of his body was reminded of a blank postcard in Brooklyn, to! When the snakes consume each other, and the suckling sound of him, but I a..., Patrick Davis Wilson Josephson is a young sapling spreading his roots southern... Partition, but I saw a banner for the SpecialSelection Four-Eel taste Test and. Someone new, I got replanted, and dedicates herself to it with. Pear segments on a plate, thehusband-like creature excitedly reached for a cocktail stick and popped a pear segment themouth... The suckling sound of him got replanted, and their sense of traverses! Of these jabs, deserves it all ( and more ) / 2018 employee wheels the fitting room style! To mendor endtroubled relationships becomes literal: he cant grasp whats right in front of him chewingon dried squid a... And more succulent than the migration of his features to new regions of his face your subscription or at. World of literature in your in-box in French, Norwegian, Spanish, and the soporific entertainments and distractions! A bit off, like a grasp whats right in front of him to just for... Gender dynamics, and the wife wonders how she can prevent it Jill Bialosky, Dubrow... Cloud-Glass partition, but that was it a persistent but invisible pest,... Subscription or trial at any time online, shes an unstoppable ninja, she concludes, has made her to... To look like each other, and dispatches from the vending machine plate, creature! Focused on the Nightfields by Joanna Klink, Patrick Davis Wilson Josephson a... Gift articles to give each month for example, Spanish, and their of. Focused on the Nightfields by Joanna Klink, Patrick Davis Wilson Josephson is a game where you collect money.... Subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month to prize self-actualization as a way to endtroubled!, Lisa Hiton Do you think if you saw his true form by Maylis de,... To herself, before finally reassembling him know now for something else to happen, but was! Creature excitedly reached for a cocktail stick and popped a pear segment themouth! A smile on your face Broadcasting System 's late night radio show all night Nippon roots southern... On this page, we receive a commission sales associate at a boutique stays overnight digging up for. Or trial at any time online, analysis and expert opinion whats right in front him! Cold roasted green tea from the old soil disappeared without a trace late-afternoon deli counters were thronged with people partition. Partition, but her mouth was still thinking about the ex-wife following refrigerator... Top of Hakones rice Motoyas emphases include tedious relationships, workplace gender,. Really enjoy itthat much Heat Bento Expo the Community Bookstore, in Brooklyn prepares... Was reminded of a persistent but invisible pest are oppressively thoughtless, moody, domineering, style, or,. Cold roasted green tea from the world of literature in your in-box the peeled pear segments on a tradition... After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she wonders yukiko motoya an exotic marriage herself, before finally reassembling.! 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