Yukiko Motoya - The Lonesome Bodybuilder - Stories

Eventually, her husband got up from the sofa. Seeming to have recovered his strength, he looked up at Tomoko and, casting subtle shadows on his face through its delicate ridges, gently said, “I’m the one who should be apologizing. It’s just a car. I’m sorry I got so upset over it. Shall we go for another run?”

With her hand clasped in her husband’s, Tomoko forgot that she had just been imagining a hunk of straw getting swallowed in flames. She accepted the invitation cheerfully. “Good idea. Let’s go.”

As they ran through the park, which was slightly more crowded than it had been earlier, Tomoko shifted her gaze up to the turning leaves, and murmured, “It’s beautiful.” The sunlight spilling through the trees. The fountains. Grass. Flower beds. She could hear a constant stream of instruments falling and breaking underfoot. Miniature French horns and timpani. As her husband taught her to run, Tomoko breathed in the cold air. The afternoon was lovely. The leaves overhead were as beautiful as burning fire.

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, Korean, 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 the 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.

“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, Nobel laureate, Oe Prize commentary on Arashi no pikunikku (8 of 11 stories in The Lonesome Bodybuilder )

“I wish I could live inside a Yukiko Motoya book. Her perception and wisdom make the everyday experience feel magical and weird and the strangest experience seem strangely familiar.”

—ETGAR KERET, author of Suddenly, a Knock on the Door and Seven Good Years

“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

“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 You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine and Intimations

“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 Nakano Thrift Shop and Strange Weather in Tokyo

“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 , Gunzo magazine on Arashi no pikunikku (8 of 11 stories in The Lonesome Bodybuilder )

“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… A whimsical story collection from a gifted writer with a keen eye and a playful sense of humor.”

— Kirkus Reviews

“A mix of the fantastical and the painfully real.”

— The Millions

“This inventive and chilling volume will have U.S. audiences craving more from Motoya.”

— Library Journal

“In eleven short stories, Yukiko Motoya pulls back the curtain from everyday lives, to reveal that beneath the most mundane lies a world bizarre and alien.”

— Bustle

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Arashi no Pikunikku © 2015 by Yukiko Motoya

Irui kon’in tan © 2016 by Yukiko Motoya

First published in Japan in 2015, 2016 by Kodansha Ltd., Tokyo

Publication rights for this English edition arranged through Kodansha Ltd., Tokyo

English translation copyright © 2018 by Asa Yoneda

All rights reserved

First Soft Skull edition: 2018

The following stories have been previously published, in slightly different form: “Fitting Room” (originally “Why I Can No Longer Look at a Picnic Blanket Without Laughing”) and “The Dogs” ( Granta ); “How to Burden the Girl” ( Tender ); and “Typhoon” ( Catapult ).

ISBN: 978-1-59376-678-8

eISBN: 978-1-59376-683-2

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

Cover design by salu.io

Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

Published by Soft Skull Press

1140 Broadway, Suite 704

New York, NY 10001

www.softskull.com

Soft Skull titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West

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