Yukiko Motoya - The Lonesome Bodybuilder - Stories

I was speechless with shock.

“I can tell. You’re going to leave me because you’ve gotten tired of me, aren’t you?” He was speaking in a peculiar tone, and I wondered whether he was trying to sound like me. His back started to quiver, and then the back of his head moved strangely, and, as though I were watching fast-forwarded footage, his short hair started to grow, furling and unfurling. Like inchworms crawling, the squirming tips moved as one mass toward his shoulders, copying the length of my hair.

“Why do you want to be the wife that badly?” I said. “Don’t turn into me. Be something better!”

My husband finally stopped folding laundry. I saw his ears twitch like the ears of some wild animal.

“Husband! Go be a creature of the mountain!” I commanded.

His body started to shake violently, as though it had completely lost its shape. Its outline blurred, and his back ballooned up to double its size and then shrank down until it was much smaller, over and over. But he still refused to turn around so that I could see his face, and, struck with terror, I decided I had nothing to lose. I shouted, “You can stop being husband-shaped now. Take whatever form you want to be!”

The distending body of my husband exploded with a loud pop. It settled to the floor in countless small clumps.

I switched off the TV and gingerly peered over toward the laundry, where the clumps had fallen.

“Oh!” I cried out.

A single mountain peony was blooming behind a stack of bath towels. It had translucently fine white petals, and looked nothing at all like my husband.

I never knew he wanted to be such a dainty creature. My eyes were wide with surprise at its delicateness.

As the only proof that it had once been my husband, the mountain peony’s stem was growing straight out of a pair of his underwear.

A married couple was a strange thing. Although we’d lived in such close proximity and spent our days and nights together, I hadn’t had the faintest inkling that my husband’s desire had been to be a single bloom of a mountain peony.

After daybreak, I took the mountain peony back to the mountain.

I planted him in a quiet, sunny spot near the rocky clearing where we’d set Sansho free, next to a purple gentian that was in bloom, so he wouldn’t be lonely.

Back at the apartment, I made myself breakfast, washed a single set of dishes, did one person’s worth of laundry, ran a bath for one, and got into bed.

When I closed my eyes, I sensed my fuzzy contour clamoring to reconstitute itself. This is all mine? I touched my still-humming body and felt amazed.

The following year, in late spring, I went to see my husband, who had turned into a mountain peony.

My husband was in bloom, vivaciously displaying a white flower, as pretty and unafraid as a paper lantern. Moved nearly to tears, I gazed for a while at his beautiful form. The gentian at his side, not to be outdone, was also flowering elegantly.

I lingered there, contented, until I felt ready to leave. I got up slowly and noticed that the two flowers looked very much like each other. As I examined them more closely I started to feel a chill, and I fled from the rocky clearing and left the mountain without looking back.

The first time Paprika Jiro saw it happen, he was ten years old, helping his grandpa with his greengrocer’s stall in the market. Jiro worked hard, calling out to customers to buy their fruits and vegetables, so that he could contribute to his family’s meager income. When he made a sale, he had to step on a wooden crate to reach the hanging basket where they deposited their earnings.

Grandpa’s knees and hips weren’t what they used to be, and he rarely got up from his barrel these days, but Jiro was the apple of his eye, and customers never failed to compliment him on what a fine grandson he had.

Other stalls in the market kept animals in cages to draw in customers, so Paprika Jiro did his best to compete by singing out the names of the fruits and vegetables in his clear boy soprano. His voice made people stop and listen, and brought a smile to their faces. He was going to inherit the stall one day. It should have been his dad, but he was a ne’er-do-well who drank.

It was the end of another day. Grandpa laid a gentle hand on Paprika Jiro’s head.

“Time to be getting home?”

“Yes, Grandpa.”

That was when they turned up.

Jiro heard a woman scream, and looked up and saw something approaching from the other end of the market, setting off what looked like fireworks of fish and meat and flowers, destroying stalls left and right.

Jiro gaped at the sight until he was startled into action by the cries of confusion and panic from the people around him. They’re here! They’re back!

“Come on, Grandpa, let’s go!”

Jiro tugged at Grandpa’s sleeve, but Grandpa didn’t budge. Jiro brought him his cane, but Grandpa wouldn’t take it. The ground rumbled as the thing approached, blowing up stalls and gathering speed. There were distant sounds of gunfire.

Jiro asked Grandpa why he wouldn’t move. Grandpa smoothed his frantic grandson’s head again, and said, “Getting chased on purpose, those folks, just to wreck our stalls.”

Jiro didn’t understand. An Asian man making kung-fu-type movements and a pretty white woman hurtled past in a tangle of legs. The man lost his balance and barreled headfirst into Grandpa’s stall. All too easily, the wheels came off, and with a loud noise the stall fell on its side. The basketful of coins they’d worked all day to collect spilled and rolled away.

The man leapt neatly to his feet, and he and the woman ran off, neither of them showing a speck of interest in the destruction of the stall. But Paprika Jiro had noticed how the man had lost his balance on purpose, even though there’d been nothing at his feet to trip over. The man and the woman had made sure there were vegetables flying into the air and then had exchanged a satisfied smile. Soon men in black suits came running after the two of them, shooting guns, and razed anything that was still standing, like a pair of clippers buzzing the hair off someone’s head.

Once they were gone, the market people went about quietly picking up the debris scattered all over the street. No one uttered a word of complaint. It was as though they’d been hit by a tornado or some other natural phenomenon.

“Just another part of being a market trader,” Grandpa said placidly.

In the years that followed, Jiro saw them come back, time after time, with no warning, to destroy the stalls and disappear. Grandpa was killed by a stray bullet from a man in black. When Jiro first took over the stall, he tried to improve it by borrowing a tarp from a friend to make a roof, but no sooner had he installed it than they began to fall from the sky. They bounced once off the tarp and then fell straight through it, reducing the stall to splinters. No matter where he moved the stall, they kept coming. As long as he continued to trade in open air, they found him. They were like an infestation of bugs crawling out of the woodwork.

Just once, Paprika Jiro managed to grab on to the hem of the trouser leg of the very last suited man just as he hit the ground.

“Why do you do this?… Who are you?… What did we ever do to you?” Jiro shouted, in English that he had memorized specially.

The man, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, stood Jiro upright with surprising gentleness and rubbed away a streak of dirt from his face. Jiro felt his hopes rise—he would finally get some answers!—but the man just quirked both ends of his mouth up and then made a beeline for the big metal gong that hung from the ironmonger’s stall.