The Lonesome Bodybuilder

September 1, 2018
Eleven esoteric stories from prizewinning Japanese writer Motoya.Playwright-turned-novelist Motoya has been steadily making her presence felt in the English-language market in literary magazines like Granta. Here she offers a deft combination of magic realism and contemporary irony, dosed with some surreal humor. The opener, "The Lonesome Bodybuilder," is something of an outlier as a Carver-esque study on the inner life of a largely invisible wife who yearns to become the titular bodybuilder. "Fighters are so beautiful," she writes. "Incredible bodies, both of them. Taut bone and flesh, nothing wasted." But then things go slightly askew in "Why I Can No Longer Look at a Picnic Blanket Without Laughing," about a boutique clerk and a customer who refuses to leave the changing room, and "Typhoon," about a surreal encounter with an old man at a bus shelter who knows the secrets of flight. Imagination runs away with an advertising executive in the supershort and creepy "I Called You by Name." The book is centered by a nearly novella-length story, "An Exotic Marriage," a Kafkaesque depiction that shows how even those closest to us can wind up completely alien in the end, a disturbing sentiment that is also reflected in the final story, "The Straw Husband." There is a bit of twisted, violent dystopia in "Paprika Jiro" and anime-flavored ultraviolence in "How to Burden the Girl," while "The Women" takes on notes of Quentin Tarantino in showing how love is strange. Finally, Motoya offers an arch satire on "agony aunts" in "Q&A" and produces spare, dark prose in the collection's finest story, "The Dogs," a pitch-dark meditation on isolation and alienation set in a remote wilderness.A whimsical story collection from a gifted writer with a keen eye and a playful sense of humor.

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September 24, 2018
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. The title story follows an ignored wife’s transformation into a massive weight lifter, and her husband’s clueless indifference. In the novella-length “An Exotic Marriage,” San is concerned about her husband’s increasing lassitude about work, and her perception that his facial features are melting. While she frets quietly over these changes, she also agrees to help her neighbor abandon her chronically incontinent cat in the mountains. Male fantasies about assertive girlfriends become a little too real when women start challenging their partners to duels in “The Women.” In “How to Burden the Girl,” a man yearns to save his neighbor from the gangsters that keep attacking her family and killing them one by one, but his discovery of her disturbing past rattles him. Other stories include similarly surreal elements, including a husband made of straw and the use of umbrellas to fly. Funny without collapsing into wackiness, these eccentric, beguiling stories are reminiscent of Haruki Murakami and Kafka.

November 1, 2018
In Motoya's first book to appear in English, the celebrated Japanese novelist, playwright, and media personality presents 11 offbeat modern fables that confront loneliness and selfhood. Her protagonists include an aspiring advertising executive, an aging columnist, and a recluse living among dogs. Many characters struggle to balance their social awkwardness with their ambitions. A clothing-store clerk resolves to satisfy a customer who's been in the changing room for hours, and a hopeless underachiever adores a superhuman girl tasked with defending her family from violent henchmen. Other characters encounter curious strangers, including a man who predicts the fates of passersby during a typhoon and agent-like imps who rampage through the local market. Marital volatility is another recurring subject. In the title story, a housewife begins a bodybuilding routine that reshapes her physique and, she hopes, her marriage. And in a novella-length story, a woman is convinced that she and her husband are becoming identical. Motoya spots deviant situations everywhere and creates unexpected situations that unfold like a slapstick cartoon. As silly as Motoya's stories can get, they are great fun.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)