But after four years, I hadnttried to escape from the soil that was my husband. You can still enjoy your subscription until the end of your current billing period. I carefully took a piece of each and placedthem on top of Hakones rice. Soft Skull Press. In "An Exotic Marriage," the collection's centerpiece, the narrator, Sen, marries a man who refuses to engage with the world. The mass movement of a migrating flock of . [5] It became the title story of a 2003 collection published by Kodansha. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. Okay. I turned on my heel and went back into the kitchen. Her books have been published or are forthcoming in French, Norwegian, Spanish, and Chinese, . by Yukiko Motoya ( , Motoya Yukiko, born July 14, 1979) is a Japanese novelist, playwright, theatre director, and former voice actress. 209 pages. 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. Unearthing Memory and Reclaiming the Feminine in Shanta Lee Ganders GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA, Chris Via Youd just gotten braces, and you said the metal hurt and you couldnt eat anything. 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. It settled to the floor in countless small clumps. Freed, he turns into a mountain peony. 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. This is abundantly illustrated in "An Exotic Marriage," a novella about a woman, San, who begins to fear that her husband's identity is blending with her own. In the realms of Motoya, believable behavior is more destructive and upsetting than any surreal occurrence. university I shivered, then looked up and saw there was an AC ventembedded in the ceiling right above my head. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. 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. 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. Motoyas characters suffer from a deeper affliction than alienation; theyre often lost in relationships and attempting to carve out identities amid ambivalence. Tomokos animosity toward her straw husband is as brief as it is startling. She can no longer recognize the husbands face; he starts to do housework. The Lonesome Bodybuilder is made up of 10 short stories, some barely three or four pages long, and a novella, "An Exotic Marriage". In her stories alienation is less a threat than a feature of contemporary life. 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. In Fitting Room, a saleswoman attends day and night to a mysterious customer who refuses to leave a fitting room. Number of pages: 224. Wed found a table in the seating area of the department stores food hall. Sometimes the rules of the world change on the spot. I dont remember where I read it. Do you know the story of the snake ball? Motoya likes her fiction to swerve, not drift or meander, and she doesnt have patience for wandering. In the title story, a husband watches a boxing match and asks his wife what she thinks of his body. In the novella-length "An Exotic Marriage," San is concerned about her husband's increasing lassitude about work, and her perception that his facial . 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. And so it is throughout: all these husbands are brutally banal in their ignorance, their apathies, and their cruelties. 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. Hakone quenched her thirst with cold roasted green tea from the vending machine. We support credit card, debit card and PayPal payments. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. In so many of these stories, possibilities stretch, and the abandonment of realism feels like having your eyes wrenched open. The same goes for San, whose face melts into new patterns. 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. Some changes render you, paradoxically, more yourself. He has received fellowships from the Edward Albee Foundation and the Ucross Foundation. You should be careful, her neighbor tells her. No spam, we promise! [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. 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. There was a tremor in my hand holding the paring knife. I was folding laundry on the living room floor. Any reader pursuing concrete examples of nimble writing and unconventional resolutions could do a hell of a lot worse than Yukiko Motoyas The Lonesome Bodybuilder, a collection of short stories that mangle and deform the familiar until it becomes something both wildly unexpected and deeply welcome. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. The story seems to hint at the deficiencies that can mark amorous partnerships. The wife tries her best to boost his ego, fails, then decides to take up bodybuilding. 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 'Typhoon' people take flight with their umbrellas in a great storm -- so many that eventually the narrator finds: "as I scanned the sky, I spotted loads of tiny human figures floating among the dark clouds". 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 . Bodybuilder is the best example, and in An Exotic Marriage, a familiar notion of couples starting to look alike turns eerie. 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. Her books have been published in French and Norwegian . Nov. 2018. 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. 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. On Places Ive Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown, Art Edwards She looked like she was giving it some serious thought. 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. In the wonderful title story, the narrator returns from the grocery store to find her husband sitting on the couch, watching a boxing match. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. 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. Asa Yoneda. 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. 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. Malleability can imply a womans weakness, or it can imply power. Near But Not Touching: On The Naomi Letters by Rachel Mennies, Tracy Zeman Any changes made can be done at any time and will become effective at the end of the trial period, allowing you to retain full access for 4 weeks, even if you downgrade or cancel. 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. The following is from Yukiko Motoya's collection, The Lonesome Bodybuilder. Copyright 2018 by Yukiko Motoya. Youd both be in trouble then,wouldnt you? Hakone said. At face value, the stories are fun and funny to read, but weightier questions lurk below the surface. At face value, the stories are fun and funny to read, but weightier questions lurk below the surface. 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. Let the cat do it. 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. 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. The positioning of his features was deteriorating faster thanever. 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. Didnt that explain why I didnt much mind whether it was a husbandI was living with or something only resembling a husband? 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. Infinite Entanglements in Allison Cobbs Plastic: An Autobiography, Elizabeth Bailey Whenever Id gotten close to someone in the past, Id had the feeling that little by little I was being replaced. 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. You must be concerned, said Hakone, sounding anything but as she took a pair of disposable chopsticks out of their packet. Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. World of literature in your in-box to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy Cookie. Toward her straw husband is as brief as it is throughout: all these are! 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