The Lonesome Bodybuilder: Stories
Yukiko Motoya, Asa Yoneda (translation)"An often surreal, at times disturbing, &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
Winner of the Akutagawa Prize and the Kenzaburo Oe Prize, these eleven surreal tales, set in the offices, zoos, bus stops, boutiques, & homes of contemporary Japan “are reminiscent, at least to this reader, of Joy Williams & Rivka Galchen & George Saunders” (Weike Wang, The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice).
In the English-language debut of one of Japan’s most fearlessly inventive young writers a housewife takes up bodybuilding & sees radical changes to her physique, which her workaholic husband fails to notice. A boy waits at a bus stop, mocking commuters struggling to keep their umbrellas open in a typhoon, until an old man shows him that they hold the secret to flying. A saleswoman in a clothing boutique waits endlessly on a customer who won’t come out of the fitting room, & who may or may not be human. A newlywed notices that her spouse’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 & workplaces are confronted with the bizarre, the grotesque, the fantastic, the alien–and find a doorway to liberation.