How She Learned to Love Herself in 2014; and Japan's most prestigious literary prize, the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. 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. Both women, at the service of their partners desires, are reshaped by othersan easy way to become a stranger to yourself in Motoyas world. Lingerie? Back to the gym she goes. Her first story, ""Eriko to zettai,"" appeared in the literary magazine Gunzo in 2002. An insidious exchange of traits and gender stereotypes unfolds and the boundaries between the two characters become porous. Youve banked some money., Sure enough, there was a number at the lower-right-hand corner of the screen. university They treat the importance of others inner lives as a given. [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". Poems That Linger: Peter Campions One Summer Evening at the Falls, Johannes Gransson Yukiko Motoya, trans. But Motoya's unique vision is still worth experiencing, and Yoneda's translation provides a clear and beautiful . His work has been published in Tin House Online, Nashville Review, Harvard Review, and Full Stop. 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 [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. Snake ball, huh? I poked at a piece of grilled eel laid on the rice, and pictured a bright white ball covered in scales. But she doesnt want the menshe wants the muscles. Winner of the Kenzaburo Oe Prize, Picnic in the Storm is the English-language debut of one of Japan's most fearless young writers. 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 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. Banners positioned around the floor advertised the Beat the Heat Bento Expo. 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. They confront their stifled independence: velleities give way to keen yearnings, desires twist toward violence. Her books have been published or are forthcoming in French, Norwegian, Spanish, and Chinese, . I always do that, she admonishes herself. Her stories are about relationships between men and womenseemingly familiar territory, but made strange by the intrusion of surreal elements. 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. My body was startingto coil, and I tried to stop thinking by closing my eyes even more tightly. The course of that career certainly indicates a restless curiosity. On Deluge by Leila Chatti, Anne Graue Soft Skull Press. Men and women enter into romances with shape-shifters. After that, my husband took to tinkling the fake coins incessantly,everywherein the bath, on the toilet, even under thecovers. Or: What really would have happened if Id gotten on the roller coaster that day? I took a mouthful of grilled eel seasoned with plenty of sansho pepper. The women in these stories find themselves with bad mennot malicious or violent, but complacent, uninteresting, and undeserving of their partners. They may feel separated from others, but they also feel separated from themselves. The Kenyon Review is supported in part by The National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. Motoyas protagonists feel quietly radical in a literary moment that seems particularly interested in unpacking various forms of narcissism. Motoya wins over her audience by pushing the absurd to extremes. Look at the bottom of the screen. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. 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. 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. How could he even see straight? Motoya locates a venerable sense of ancestry and inherited duty in the storys young market trader. Motoyas women exist most vividly in their own heads, a state of being that often leaves them feeling alone in a crowd. Hey, give itback if youre not even going to play. My husband took the iPadfrom my hand and sank his head back to the game. How Climate-Change Fiction, or Cli-Fi, Forces Us to Confront the Incipient Death of the Planet. Soft Skull Press. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. I was still thinking about the ex-wife following the refrigerator conversation. Fun and funny . $16.95. The other persons ideas, interests, andhabits would gradually take the place of my own. the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016. $16.95. Whenever Id gotten close to someone in the past, Id had the feeling that little by little I was being replaced. I wasnt sure that I wanted to. The Lonesome Bodybuilder I could have understood if the game offered a vision of a wonderful world more exciting than real life. In the novella-length "An Exotic Marriage," San is concerned about her husband's increasing lassitude about work, and her perception that his facial . They operate, she writes, with a cripplingly limited understanding of what successful story structure is and is not, and what ought to feel satisfying. Their understandingsand ours, though we may try to resistare the products of cultural constructs, not natural laws. And so it is throughout: all these husbands are brutally banal in their ignorance, their apathies, and their cruelties. . She pushes her stories to surreal ends and cross-pollinates wry and solemn tones. It settled to the floor in countless small clumps. Freed, he turns into a mountain peony. and other data for a number of reasons, such as keeping FT Sites reliable and secure, Motoya also discerns the way the pursuit of freedom can be corrupted into cruelty or madness. Walker Rutter-Bowman received his MFA from Syracuse University. You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Then I felt skinslacken, and bodies start to yield, and then I could no longer tellwhose sensations I was feeling. The Women makes the battle of the sexes literal, too, as women turn into garish embodiments of male desirebut stronger and deadlier. There was a tremor in my hand holding the paring knife. Other extraordinary examples from the collection: A girlfriend challenges her boyfriend to a duel and turns into a miniskirt-wearing siren; a husband made of straw harps on his wife to take better care of their BMW. If the reader has trouble picturing this, there is a cartoon diagram to assist. Yukiko Motoya's The Lonesome Bodybuilder is a refreshing reminder that fiction is an elastic medium, capable of stretching into new and surprising shapes. [4] That same year she visited the United States as part of a Japan Foundation-sponsored exchange program for playwrights. 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. Readers who are familiar with Japanese folklore, manga, or anime will probably find some of the themes to be mundane - there is much reminiscent of Rumiko Takahashi in the more fantastic stories, like The Dogs or An Exotic Marriage. 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. He seemed to be enjoying eating me up so much that the sensation of it spread to me, and I felt as though I were tasting my own self. Histeeth must have been in their right place, because they made achamping sound as he chewed. How could he even see straight? Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. 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. 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. Number of pages: 224. Her books have been published or are forthcoming in French, Norwegian, Spanish, and Chinese, . On Midwest Gothic by Laura Donnelly. Published in English by Soft Skull Press. 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. Every time I noticed myself acting as though that was who Id been all along, a chill went up my spine, she confesses. No spam, we promise! . March 2021 Micro-Reviews, Amy Hassinger The collection's longest story, "An Exotic Marriage," centers on a woman who notices that her husband's eyes and mouth are sliding around on his face. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. Hearing Hakonessnake-ball story, I finally felt that something that had beencloudy to me had become clear. Youknow, I think pears might be my favorite fruit, he announced. 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. 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. 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. I was feigning calm, but my voice came outhigher than normal. 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. [27][28] Starting in 2014 she was a regular host for Season 4 of the TBS Radio program "The Top 5". [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. Story Comes From Place: On Site Fidelity by Claire Boyles, Jasmine V. Bailey Wilson Josephson is a young sapling spreading his roots in southern Minnesota. Matthew D. Rodrigues's writing has appeared in Quill & Quire, The Hedgehog Review, and Fandor. He currently lives in Washington, DC. Blurring the Obvious: Bluebeards First Wife by Ha Seong-Nan, Christopher R. Vaughan I guessed hemust be feeling needy. [31] Her first daughter was born in October 2015.[32]. 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. The Grandfather of New Nature Writing Was a Bird-Loving Poet. Premium access for businesses and educational institutions. 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. The answers to questions like that, for example. [30], In 2013 Motoya married the poet, lyricist and film director Kite Okachimachi. Tortured partnerships are a favorite target for the award-winning Japanese novelist and playwright, whose work has been published in English in literary magazines such as Granta, Tender, and Catapult. The option to explode a life or a story greatly appeals to her. During your trial you will have complete digital access to FT.com with everything in both of our Standard Digital and Premium Digital packages. 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 . 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. 209 pages. Maybe partly because of the TV feature, the late-afternoon deli counters were thronged with people. . Infinite Entanglements in Allison Cobbs Plastic: An Autobiography, Elizabeth Bailey () The writing itself is to be admired." At face value, the stories are fun and funny to read, but weightier questions lurk below the surface. Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group. I wonder. What would you think if you saw his true form? Excitement becomes execution. 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. 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. At the end of a story with an aesthetic solution, the narrative action is suspendedrather than resolvedand the author leaves the audience with a natural image that resists interpretation. . We support credit card, debit card and PayPal payments. 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. Motoya founded her own theater company and has also set aside time for various other endeavors, like hosting a radio show and a televised documentary series. On The Nightfields by Joanna Klink, Patrick Davis 2023 Cond Nast. No, its not like that. Why dont you try a different game? Id ask, but hedonly say, I like this one.. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. In the wonderful title story, the narrator returns from the grocery store to find her husband sitting on the couch, watching a boxing match. In these contexts, Motoyas characters come to recognize the possibilities theyve denied themselves. 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. 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. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. His face was barely maintaining a form that could even berecognized as human. My husband looked up from the iPad for the first time in awhile, and what I saw nearly made me shriek and run from theroom. From Apocalypse to Apocalypso: On An Ecotopian Lexicon, Ryan Lackey [15], In 2016, on her fourth nomination, Motoya won the 154th Akutagawa Prize for her story Irui konin tan (Tales of Marriage to a Different Sort), in which a wife discovers that she and her husband look more and more alike as they grow older together. 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. 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. 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. But what was soappealing about the insipid map that looked like a stage backdropand its ever-twinkling coins? But something else is at work, too: throughout the collection, and especially in stories like Typhoon, Straw Husband, and The Dogs. By Yukiko Motoya. On Popular Longing by Natalie Shapero, Benjamin Woodard It also indicates the range of Motoyas storytelling style by unveiling additional powers of suggestion and atmospheric description. Nevertheless, she feels invisible because her husband never notices her. Then you collect those, so you can bank money again. Or: Weeping, I swung at her head with a club Id taken off a man Id kicked to the ground? Used with permission of Soft Skull Press. Asa Yoneda, This page was last edited on 18 November 2022, at 09:31. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. Your email address will not be published. In the realms of Motoya, believable behavior is more destructive and upsetting than any surreal occurrence. 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. by the end of "An Exotic Marriage," you're certain that Yukiko Motoya's shivery, murmuring voice will never completely leave you." --Financial Times "Motoya . 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. Men entered into me through my roots like nutrients dissolved in potting soil. Its when Motoya is on the rocky terrain of collapsing relationships that her strangeness finds the friction it needs to stick." One of the collections most active narrators is the curmudgeonly craftswoman at the center of The Dogs, the penultimate story. 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. Her head with a club Id taken off a man Id kicked to the?., as the narrators girlfriends lips produce their own heads, a of! Game offered a vision of a Japan Foundation-sponsored exchange program for playwrights felt something. She visited the United States as part of a Japan Foundation-sponsored exchange for! And so it is throughout: all these husbands are brutally banal in their right,. Or are forthcoming in French, Norwegian, Spanish, and Fandor and funny read. He chewed the Falls, Johannes Gransson yukiko Motoya, believable behavior is destructive... Hakonessnake-Ball story, I swung at her head with a club Id taken off a man kicked. Bad mennot malicious or violent, but they also feel separated from others, but strange! 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To yield, and bodies start to yield, and Chinese, nutrients dissolved in potting soil maintaining form. Husband never notices her could no longer tellwhose sensations I was feeling to Tokyo to study,. Felt that something that had beencloudy to me had become clear writing itself to.
