Yukiko Motoya - The Lonesome Bodybuilder - Stories

When Jiro quit the vegetable stall to become the market’s pigeon seller, they returned immediately and liberated every last one of his pigeons before he could say a word.

The whole market accepted them as a fact of life. No one else wondered where they came from or where they were going. But Paprika Jiro wanted to know the truth. One night, he filled a big pot with glue and placed it in front of the stall. A few days later, when he heard a woman scream at the entrance to the market, he stripped naked and jumped inside.

Jiro waited inside the slimy pot of glue, pinching his nose and holding his breath. The sounds of chaos gradually got louder, until he heard something break nearby. One of them thundered toward the pot where Jiro was hiding and smashed straight into it.

Covered head to toe in glue, Paprika Jiro stuck to the back of one man in a suit and watched the market grow smaller and smaller behind him. Once they had cleared the village and entered the desert, the man gave a strange cry— Er-hai! —and ran as fast as the wind. Jiro discovered that what he had assumed to be a dark business suit was actually just skin that looked like a suit. Even the sunglasses were part of the man’s body.

Gradually, a group of large-breasted women and well-muscled men gathered behind Jiro, in a line that trailed into the distance. Their numbers swelled and swelled. They fired their guns wildly as they ran, and retrieved and ate fruits and vegetables they had somehow taken from the market from the inside pockets of their skins. When night fell, they ran even faster.

Eventually the glue peeled, and Paprika Jiro fell off into the desert. It took him seven days and seven nights to get back to his village.

Paprika Jiro remains a market trader today. These days he sees them less and less often.

“Because no one really believes in them anymore,” says the ironmonger.

Once in a while, they still come through. Just like old times: in high style, in a cloud of dust and mayhem. As a mark of utmost respect, Paprika Jiro does his best to react in exaggerated astonishment as they careen through, fearlessly confronting obstacles head-on.

What was I thinking, getting involved with a girl like her? The only reason I was interested in the first place was that I thought she was an innocent young thing standing up to an evil gang all on her own. I had no intention of getting mixed up in such a violent love affair.

“You said you’d do anything to get to know me,” she said, inching closer again.

I’d said that, sure. But I was thirty-four. I was dubious about my chances of understanding someone so much younger than I was, and anyway I know nothing about women. I’d just thought she must be lonely, what with her entire family having been killed by an evil gang, so the words had just slipped out. There was no need for her to take them seriously.

She moved slowly toward me. She’d just blown the heads off nineteen evil henchmen. I watched her closely while I retreated. I looked at the tears of blood she was crying because her beloved father had just become the last of her family to die, killed in a manner so diabolically cruel as to seem beyond human imagining. The special tears were the whole reason the gang was after her. I didn’t know the details. I’d simply been taken by the way the girl’s thighs looked, sticking out of her skirt. The pink hair, the emerald-green eyes—those were a little freakish, admittedly, but they didn’t bother me. I’d thought some of them must just come like that. My old man would cry and sigh and call me a hopeless ignoramus if he knew. My mother walked out on the two of us a long time ago, so he’s all the family I’ve got.

I kept creeping backward, and before I knew it, I’d left the living room. My foot came up against the staircase in the hall. Her house was enormous. She, her father, and her five brothers had moved here sometime last year, settling into a quiet life next door to the house I’ve always lived in. It looked like the girl’s father took care of all the errands and things in the huge house behind the high wall, so at first I was simply excited to know there was someone next door in the same situation as I was. I rarely feel any curiosity toward other people, but I took to watching her through the windows occasionally, and would see her taking really good care of her five little brothers. This made me feel pretty inadequate. I leave all my cleaning and laundry to my old man. His stuff I leave up to him too.

At some point, I started to find it strange that she never left the house. What’s more, the five little brothers, who looked so alike they could have been quintuplets, seemed to be disappearing one by one. I mean, one day there were only four boys playing in the garden; then there were three; then two. The little brothers carried on tumbling around the garden looking carefree, but on the days just after one had vanished, the father would usually come out and hold the girl’s hand as she sat in a chair on the deck. On those days she’d forgo her usual bare legs and cover up in a dark outfit, looking glum. But why no funeral? Why no police?

One night, I saw one of the little boys nearly get snatched by members of an evil gang. I knew that that was what they were because their getup was pretty unmistakable: masked faces, capes, in black from head to toe. The girl and her father were fighting them off in their garden—him with a gun, and her with the kind of long sword I thought existed only in movies. (People around here pay no mind to moderate amounts of noise or gunfire, because there’s a massive ballpark around the corner; their hearing’s shot.) I was taken aback by the girl’s almost superhuman physical ability. Her father looked realistic enough, like a man holding a gun, but the skill with which she wielded her sword as she killed those henchmen was way out of the ordinary. I should have realized then that she was different from your average woman, but what can I say? The only person I could compare her to was my old man.

They managed to save the little kid from being taken that day, but a few days later the gang came back and killed the kid in a gruesome fashion. That was my first sight of her tears of blood. The gang members held her down and used a dropper to collect a few tears into a vial and disappeared into the woods behind the house with a purposeful swirl of their capes. The garden was littered with the bodies of the little boy and numerous dead henchmen. Then there was the girl, sitting on the ground, clutching grass. And her father, coming up to her and gently putting his hand on her shoulder.

I started to piece the situation together. The gang was after her (for whatever reason), and it was no use trying to run (because they’d catch up at some point), so the girl and her father were trying to force a showdown next door. That much I got. I did think maybe their plan was in a little bit of a rut, what with the way the gang seemed to insist on attacking the house repeatedly instead of just taking the girl hostage, or the way she and her father let the little boys roam around for the taking when they could have been kept out of harm’s way in a shelter somewhere. But I don’t like to sweat the details.

That being said, if it had occurred to me, surely it had occurred to her—that once all the little brothers were dead, her father would be next. Reduced to just the two of them, the girl and her father expanded their arsenal and kept their guard up around the clock. It’s possible they were staying put because they were using the father as bait, to lure out the evil gang and eradicate them once and for all instead of trying to find their HQ.

Their epic daily battles racked up mountains of dead henchmen, until one day it all came to an end. Her father was finally taken down.