Staff Pick
Yukiko Motoya takes the mundane and brilliantly spikes it with the fantastical, the aberrant, and the all-out unexpected. These stories tilt the axis of reality by degrees, deftly inverting scenes of both solitude and cohabitation, pitting the personal against the domestic. Amid increasingly splashy motifs, The Lonesome Bodybuilder asks how we define ourselves through our relationships to others and whether our true identities can ever be known. Buoyant, charming, and layered with intent, this collection deserves a bevy of admirers. Recommended By Justin W., Powells.com
The Lonesome Bodybuilder takes ordinary people and thrusts them into bizarre situations, which they accept with equanimity: the woman morphing into her husband doesn't question the transformation, just does her best to deal with it. The child confronted with a mysterious specter at the bus shelter doesn't run away, but eventually eats the biscuit he offers (and it's delicious). The world's most dedicated saleswoman will not leave work until her amorphous, possibly alien client finds the perfect garment. It is both amusing and a devastatingly effective way to explore our most elemental fears. Motoya's stories are neon bright with touches of darkness, like Saturday morning cartoons that occasionally veer into the grotesque. Recommended By Lauren P., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the Akutagawa Prize and the Kenzaburo Oe Prize
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
"In Yukiko Motoya's delightful new story collection, the familiar becomes unfamiliar... 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." —Weike Wang, The New York Times Book Review
A housewife takes up bodybuilding and sees radical changes to her physique, which her workaholic husband fails to notice. A boy waits at a bus stop, mocking commuters struggling to keep their umbrellas open in a typhoon, until an old man shows him that they hold the secret to flying. A saleswoman in a clothing boutique waits endlessly on a customer who won't come out of the fitting room, and who may or may not be human. A newlywed notices that her spouse's features are beginning to slide around his face to match her own.
In these eleven stories, the individuals who lift the curtains of their orderly homes and workplaces are confronted with the bizarre, the grotesque, the fantastic, the alien — and find a doorway to liberation. The English-language debut of one of Japan's most fearlessly inventive young writers.
Review
"Eleven esoteric stories from prizewinning Japanese writer Motoya....A whimsical story collection from a gifted writer with a keen eye and a playful sense of humor." Kirkus Reviews
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"Motoya's English-language debut is an unusual but ingenious collection that blends dark humor and bemused first-person narrators suddenly confronted with unhappy relationships and startling realities....Funny without collapsing into wackiness...eccentric, beguiling." Publishers Weekly
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"The celebrated Japanese novelist, playwright, and media personality presents 11 offbeat modern fables that confront loneliness and selfhood....As silly as Motoya's stories can get, they are great fun." Booklist
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"In this delightful collection, realistic setups turn magical and surreal to illuminate deeper themes of marriage, gender and love." The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice
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"Motoya [has a] gift for making the ordinary magical." Jane Ciabattari, BBC Culture
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"Motoya has an extraordinary imagination and a clear, direct writing style which makes this offbeat collection a rare treat." Martha Alexander, Evening Standard
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"Like a bouquet of exotic flowers, her stories are varied and full of surprise....Readers who still enjoy fiction for sheer entertainment should get their hands on these stories." The Japan Times
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"Offering a fascinating and insightful dimension into the intricacies of human paranoia....A hopeful exploration of things that appear outlandish or foreign, these stories are deft, courageous, and written with intense honesty and clarity." PEN America
Review
"Charming, bizarre, and uncanny, The Lonesome Bodybuilder is Etgar Keret by way of Yoko Ogawa. I'd follow Yukiko Motoya anywhere she wanted to take me." Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
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"Motoya has crafted a world — nay, a universe — entirely of her own with peculiar logic and physics. That mark of creativity is something that should be celebrated... Hold on to your seatbelts... because this is quite a ride, a thrill, a rush. Nothing like this has been done before, after all, and you're bound to get something beguiling out of this work." Zachary Houle
Review
"Playful and eerie and utterly enchanting, Yukiko Motoya's stories are like fun-house mazes built to get lost in, where familiar shapes and features from the everyday world are revealed to you as if for the first time, twisted into marvelously odd shapes. These eleven stories possess a mundanely magical logic all their own, surprising and entirely absorbing." Alexandra Kleeman, author of Intimations and You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine
Review
"I was impressed by how each story has a different idea, none being mere variations on a theme. It's not a book to consume in one sitting. Read carelessly and you run the risk of ending up flat on your back with no idea of what just hit you. It dawned on me that in these pieces, Motoya, already well-known for theater, was trying to achieve in fiction the gamut of what can't be done on stage. Reading this made me want to sit down and get to work. This is a collection that is provocative to writers as well." Yasutaka Tsutsui, author of Paprika
Review
"I could never try to explain Yukiko Motoya's stories. For me, the joy of reading fiction isn't to analyze it, but to feel it in my body. In that sense, her writing offers enormous satisfaction to the sensitive organ inside me that is attuned to the pleasure of reading." Hiromi Kawakami, author of The Nakano Thrift Shop and Strange Weather in Tokyo
Review
"I knew immediately this book was a work of quality entertainment by a writer who had consciously worked to hone their craft — but was it literature? I had the lingering doubts of an old man now far removed from the current readership. Wanting to delve deeper, I decided to read it again, laying aside my long-held view of fiction: one that demarcated 'entertainment' from 'real literature.' I realized I couldn't deny it. This collection serves almost as a sampler of fresh ideas and forms, but the pieces demanded more than simply to enjoy them and then put them away, saying, 'Well, that was fun.' How is it that these pieces work with their twists and tricks, and then, on top of that, also attain the state of literature? The writer possesses an acuity in human observation that will be a life's work, and the prose skill to describe it concisely. After tasting the delightful surprises in each story in this varied collection, I felt not as though I had passed through a gallery hung with individual talents, but that I had seen at one glance the irrepressible formation of an artist." Kenzaburo Oe, author of A Personal Matter and The Silent Cry
About the Author
Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. Her first story, "Eriko to zettai," appeared in the literary magazine Gunzo in 2002. 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. Her books have been published or are forthcoming in French, Norwegian, Spanish, and Chinese, and her stories have been published in English in Granta, Words Without Borders, Tender, and Catapult.
Asa Yoneda was born in Osaka and studied language, literature, and translation at University of Oxford and SOAS University of London. She now lives in Bristol, U.K. In addition to Yukiko Motoya, she has translated works by Banana Yoshimoto, Aoko Matsuda, and Natsuko Kuroda.
Kelsey Ford on PowellsBooks.Blog
I love short story collections because of how much they manage to do with so little. They can dilate, expand, shatter, constellate. Within any given collection, you can move from the moon to a diner after midnight to that liminal minute right when you wake up but are still knee-deep in a dream..
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