09/24/2018
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. (Nov.)
The Lonesome Bodybuilder: Stories
Narrated by Natalie Naudus, Brian Nishii, Various Narrators
Yukiko MotoyaUnabridged — 5 hours, 9 minutes
The Lonesome Bodybuilder: Stories
Narrated by Natalie Naudus, Brian Nishii, Various Narrators
Yukiko MotoyaUnabridged — 5 hours, 9 minutes
Overview
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 businessmen struggling to keep their umbrellas open in a typhoon-until an old man shows him that they hold the secret to flying. A woman working 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 husband'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, through it, find a way to liberation. The Lonesome Bodybuilder is the English-language debut of one of Japan's most fearlessly inventive young writers.
Editorial Reviews
Praise for The Lonesome Bodybuilder
The Millions , Most Anticipated in the Second Half of 2018
"Prize-winning Japanese author Motoya offers a collection of 11 stories that fuse the banality of the everyday with dreamlike elements of fantasy. Motoya explores marriage, gender and power through stories that begin with real life—the titular story is about a woman who decides to become a bodybuilder—and slowly turn surreal." — Time
"Yukiko Motoya’s English-language debut, The Lonesome Bodybuilder , translated by Asa Yoneda, features characters that move in and out of surreal circumstances as if wandering through different rooms of a house. In the story 'The Straw Husband,' a woman is married to a man made of straw who, after becoming upset with her, begins to spew miniature orchestral instruments—timpani, clarinets, snare drums—from his body, until he’s left deflated and unconscious. This is just one of several of Motoya’s stories that examine relationships, especially marriage between a man and a woman, with an absurdist lens. But we can still recognize the discord and unruliness of human emotions; the story unfolds with a kind of quiet violence often found in the domestic realm." — T: The New York Times Style Magazine
"Motoya [has a] gift for making the ordinary magical." — Jane Ciabattari, BBC Culture
"Like a bouquet of exotic flowers, her stories are varied and full of surprise, starting out with mundane situations and then turning strange . . . It takes skill to pull off magical realism—and Motoya is up to the task . . . Readers who still enjoy fiction for sheer entertainment should get their hands on these stories." — The Japan Times
"This may well give Your Duck Is My Duck a run for its money as best title of the century. People around the world have been whispering Motoya’s name in my ear. Now she’s translated into English!" — Gary Shteyngart, Vulture , Most Anticipated Fall Books
"An often surreal, at times disturbing, and reliably twisted look at the hidden sides of our everyday lives. By peeking behind the closed doors of our mundane existences, Motoya offers up truly unsettling looks at the things people are capable of doing. It is a particular, strange pleasure to read these stories for the first time; everyone should relish getting that opportunity." — NYLON , 1 of 21 Books You'll Want to Read This Fall
"Japanese author Motoya, winner of the country’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize, returns to U.S. readers with a blissfully surreal collection . . . Reality blurs with the fantastic, offering a welcome escape hatch out of a seemingly impossibly bleak world." ― HuffPost , 1 of 34 Fall 2018 Books We Can't Wait to Read
"This is especially perfect for any Haruki Murakami fans out there . . . Her stories capture the small, intimate moments that make up relationships. Come for the fun neon cover, stay for the beautifully crafted stories." — The Daily Princetonian
"In 11 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 , 1 of 11 Most Anticipated Books Published by Indie Presses to Have on Your Radar in 2018
"This newly translated collection of short stories is a peek into the lives of seemingly ordinary characters who find themselves in bizarre, otherworldly, and truly strange circumstances that will challenge the boundaries of your imagination." — Bustle
"The eleven stories in The Lonesome Bodybuilder are as acute as fiction can get. They are knife-sharp, almost unbearably precise . . . A reader could easily be so transported by the dark-fairytale nature of Motoya’s stories, their glimmering weirdness and constant, sly humor, that she forgets to think about the translator . . . There is wonder in translation, and especially in a translation as thoughtful and skillful as this. The Lonesome Bodybuilder is a rare and absolute treat." — Lily Meyer, Electric Literature
"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, these eccentric, beguiling stories are reminiscent of Haruki Murakami and Kafka." — Publishers Weekly
"This inventive and chilling volume will have U.S. audiences craving more from Motoya." — Library Journal
"The twelve hilarious fables in Yukiko Motoya’s The Lonesome Bodybuilder look at everyday life so closely they turn it inside out . . . Like Kelly Link and Karen Russell, the writers in America she most resembles, there’s an almost magician-like quality to what Motoya does: there’s no sleight of hand. It happens right in front of you. Yet the way she tilts reality always interrogates something bigger, like the meaning of masculinity in a marriage. This is thrilling work, and alongside Mieko Kawakami and Sayaka Murata, it seems clear there’s a movement of sorts coming from Japan." — John Freeman, Literary Hub
"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
"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."— Booklist
"Inventive and fearless storytelling . . . There is one thing guaranteed with Motoya’s work: no story is ever going to go the way you predict and that is something we don’t find too often in literature."— Metropolis
"Perfect for fans of absurd, dark humor . . . In Japanese contemporary fiction, we’re often given a slice of life and that life is explored to its fullest. Motoya has managed to achieve that same feat within a few pages and then turn it on its head in the most ridiculous manner. Masterful." — Metropolis
"Imaginative and unusual . . . The stories in this colorful volume see through the veil of the bureaucratic everyday and reveal the surreal that rests behind each changing-room door and under each umbrella." — World Literature Today
“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 Intimations and You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine
"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
“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
“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
2018-08-21
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.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169915242 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/06/2018 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Videos
