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. At face value, the stories are fun and funny to read, but weightier questions lurk below the surface. [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). Lying on the couch, they prompt the strange impression of a new kind of organism that would die if it exerted itself in any way. There is acid in Motoyas surrealism: these women will put up with anything! 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. The Lonesome Bodybuilder (published as Picnic in the Storm in the UK .) 'These arresting, hyper-real stories linger in the imagination . [30], In 2013 Motoya married the poet, lyricist and film director Kite Okachimachi. But I guess that cant be right. . In "An Exotic Marriage," the collection's centerpiece, the narrator, Sen, marries a man who refuses to engage with the world. How Climate-Change Fiction, or Cli-Fi, Forces Us to Confront the Incipient Death of the Planet. Then I felt skinslacken, and bodies start to yield, and then I could no longer tellwhose sensations I was feeling. 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. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. The title story is one of her best: "Fighters are so . Other women in the book pursue men who are made of straw or advise each other to marry bicycle saddles. Motoya was born in Hakusan, Ishikawa. She commits to it, lifting regularly and consuming protein powder, yet while others notice her transformation, her husband does not. [27][28] Starting in 2014 she was a regular host for Season 4 of the TBS Radio program "The Top 5". 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. One of Mocketts main foci is an introduction to Hayao Kawais suggestion of an aesthetic solution common in Japanese literature. $16.95. Do you remember, on our honeymoon, how I chewed up allthe fruit for you so you could eat it?, Sure. Youknow, I think pears might be my favorite fruit, he announced. Her novel Funuke domo kanashimi no ai o misero (Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers!) You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many users needs. Asa Yoneda. The husband . Her books have been published or are forthcoming in French, Norwegian, Spanish, and Chinese, . the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. But Id like us to stay as separate people for a little longer., I mean, getting married, that means swallowing everything about the other person, the good things and the bad. 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. was published in 2005. [5] She appears in the ending sequences of FLCL during credits, in which she's listed as model. He currently lives in Washington, DC. How could he even see straight? () By the first few sentences of, "Like soap bubbles, several of these stories catch your eye, but the instant they are gone you forget about them. 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. 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. On The Renunciations by Donika Kelly, John Bonanni 209 pages. Never is the ennui of these men treated as anything more than a product of their privilege and their twisted expectations of the people around themwhich rescues much of the collection from a dive into the dour and dismal. (Several tales allude to Kwaidan, a ghoulish anthology compiled by the folklorist Lafcadio Hearn, in 1904.). The Grandfather of New Nature Writing Was a Bird-Loving Poet. In her stories alienation is less a threat than a feature of contemporary life. March 2021 Micro-Reviews, Amy Hassinger . There is something pareidolic about the writing process. The Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers, Developmental Editing Fellowship for Emerging Writers, Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. In The Straw Husband, the narrators husband is just that, straw, but his composition is less concerning than his inordinate devotion to his car. Strangely, too, the men Id been with had all wanted me to grow in them. How She Learned to Love Herself in 2014; and Japan's most prestigious literary prize, the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. My mission is to stay as free and unfettered as possible. Yukiko Motoya so commented on her career and creative process during an interview for Granta. The positioning of his features was deteriorating faster thanever. Premium access for businesses and educational institutions. The author reaches, with language, toward a reader who may or may not be there. No, its not like that. Only when you begin reading, when the . She 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 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. Youre accommodating, San, and before you know itshe breaks off, as Sans features rearrange themselves to mirror her partners. and then the short story "The Exotic Marriage" is a whopping eighty five pages long. And so it is throughout: all these husbands are brutally banal in their ignorance, their apathies, and their cruelties. or 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. Used with permission of Soft Skull Press. I saw it on the local news the other day. In addition to the thrills of its unexpected turns, The Lonesome Bodybuilder offers both an incisive critique of many small, domestic patriarchies and occasional glimpses of what life could be without them. The answers to questions like that, for example. Oh, those, my husband said, turning his shoulders towardme. Id expected marriage to be an even more constricting flowerpot than my previous relationships. There was no response. Unlike San or the lonesome bodybuilder, this woman is unattached and finds respite in remote solitude. Some Googling I did found out that this was actually published as a novella . 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 . Idplanned to just wait for her, but I saw a banner for the SpecialSelection Four-Eel Taste Test Bento and was tempted into gettingone. Near But Not Touching: On The Naomi Letters by Rachel Mennies, Tracy Zeman 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. Arent you going to have any? the husband-like thing said. Whenever Id gotten close to someone in the past, Id had the feeling that little by little I was being replaced. Why dont you try a different game? Id ask, but hedonly say, I like this one.. I think thats the image I have of marriage. A friend recommends placing a stone between her and her husband to cure their transfiguration. But what was soappealing about the insipid map that looked like a stage backdropand its ever-twinkling coins? Why was I so happy to be married to a bunch of straw?, she wonders to herself, before finally reassembling him. [12][13] Motoya subsequently won the 7th Kenzaburo Oe Prize for her 2012 collection Arashi no pikunikku (Picnic in the Storm),[14] and the 27th Mishima Yukio Prize for her 2013 novel Jibun wo suki ni naru houhou. What if thereends up being more of the bad? In The Lonesome Bodybuilder, the pest is always a yawning disconnect between people. How had I ended up married to a completely different species of being from me? San wonders to herself, before her features begin to mutate too. 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. The unpredictable narratives pair with curious and compelling imagery to create a palpable and inexplicable sense of wonder. Bodybuilder is the best example, and in An Exotic Marriage, a familiar notion of couples starting to look alike turns eerie. 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. 2023 Cond Nast. If youd like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. We have to accept that were responsible for the physical effects theyre experiencing! a man yells, as the narrators girlfriends lips produce their own lipstick; the narrator tearfully euthanizes her. This sense of unpredictability traverses the entire collection, and yet the stories rarely seem desultory. . And like so many arbitrary signifiers of taste, style, or quality, they are focused exclusively on a western tradition. I sat down on the couch and looked at the iPad screen. [17] The prize-winning work became the title story of a collection of four stories published later that year by Kodansha. In How to Burden the Girl, a thirty-four-year-old recluse spies on the younger woman who has moved in next door. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. . [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". When I sat down next to him, the husband-like thing pickedup the TV remote and started flipping through channels. Infinite Entanglements in Allison Cobbs Plastic: An Autobiography, Elizabeth Bailey "The Reason I Carry Biscuits to Offer to Young Boys", trans. I have the feeling I would have met a version of myself I dont know now? -, "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. 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