Yukiko Motoya is a writer, playwright, and stage director. They operate, she writes, with a cripplingly limited understanding of what successful story structure is and is not, and what ought to feel satisfying. Their understandingsand ours, though we may try to resistare the products of cultural constructs, not natural laws. For a full comparison of Standard and Premium Digital, click here. This normalization gives the stories their irony and their sense of being just a bit off, like a lingering scent of formaldehyde. As a leashed man miserably admits, just before being yanked to mortal combat, This is all because of the desires of men like us. Such a desire, for a more exciting lover, has exciting effects: the women demand duels, then take their husbands and boyfriends down by the river to kill them. Motoya was born in Hakusan, Ishikawa. Motoya also discerns the way the pursuit of freedom can be corrupted into cruelty or madness. () By the first few sentences of, "Like soap bubbles, several of these stories catch your eye, but the instant they are gone you forget about them. I think?. How had I ended up married to a completely different species of being from me? San wonders to herself, before her features begin to mutate too. My husband seemed anxious to make a snake ball with me. The pears?. Look at the bottom of the screen. . I fled from thetinkling of coins falling and the suckling sound of him chewingon dried squid. Her quickly buried feelings recall Sans mutating features. I have the feeling I would have met a version of myself I dont know now? Youd just gotten braces, and you said the metal hurt and you couldnt eat anything. Left to their own devices, these characters may have been content with the status quo, but the universe Motoya builds taunts them with their secret motivations until theyre forced to confront them publicly. Motoya founded her own theater company and has also set aside time for various other endeavors, like hosting a radio show and a televised documentary series. [4] From 2005 to 2006 Motoya was the Friday host for Nippon Broadcasting System's late night radio show All Night Nippon. Motoyas book beguiles with its reversals: the bodybuilders husband may be unobservant to the point of eeriness, but, as it turns out, she is the shape-shifter, the trickster. Never is the ennui of these men treated as anything more than a product of their privilege and their twisted expectations of the people around themwhich rescues much of the collection from a dive into the dour and dismal. But Id like us to stay as separate people for a little longer., I mean, getting married, that means swallowing everything about the other person, the good things and the bad. The option to explode a life or a story greatly appeals to her. [15], In 2016, on her fourth nomination, Motoya won the 154th Akutagawa Prize for her story Irui konin tan (Tales of Marriage to a Different Sort), in which a wife discovers that she and her husband look more and more alike as they grow older together. Winner of the Kenzaburo Oe Prize, Picnic in the Storm is the English-language debut of one of Japan's most fearless young writers. Id brought her to the store, promising to buy her something new to wear, or anything else she wanted, but Hakone had headed straight for the escalator down to the basement food hall and asked for a bento. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. Some Googling I did found out that this was actually published as a novella . When something akin to freedom is gained, its often vague or ostensible, but the impediments to that freedom are surveyed in great detail. She is typical of Motoyas women: conferring an excess of personhood on whomever or whatever is at hand, yearning to connect to something that isnt there. By the first few sentences, you know you're hearing the voice of a remarkable writer; by the end of [the story] "An Exotic Marriage", you're certain that Yukiko Motoya's shivery, murmuring voice will never completely leave you., Financial Times These uncanny stories surprise, unnerve and haunt, Spectator Incredibly enjoyable stories, Daily Mail . You can have two slices of my steak if you give me some ofyour eel.. Didnt that explain why I didnt much mind whether it was a husbandI was living with or something only resembling a husband? The wife tries her best to boost his ego, fails, then decides to take up bodybuilding. Japanese novelist, playwright, and theatre director, "Yukiko Motoya takes a satirical look at the 'Super No-Flat', "Yusho Takiguchi, Yukiko Motoya share Akutagawa Prize while Bumpei Aoyama wins Naoki Prize", " ", "From violence to vulnerability, Yukiko Motaya enchants with 'The Lonesome Bodybuilder', "Yukiko Motoya's Surreal World of Alienated Characters", "Husbands and Wives Magically Morph in a Japanese Story Collection", "The Lonesome Bodybuilder: Stories by Yukiko Motoya tales of the unexpected", "Presenter Interview: The Playwright's Center of Minneapolis", "53rd Kishida Kunio Drama Award goes to Ryuta Horai and Yukiko Motoya in a double awarding", "Why I Can No Longer Look at a Picnic Blanket Without Laughing", "The Reason I Carry Biscuits to Offer to Young Boys", "Alexandra Kleeman recommends "The Lonesome Bodybuilder" by Yukiko Motoya", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yukiko_Motoya&oldid=1122580502, Short description is different from Wikidata, Pages using embedded infobox templates with the title parameter, Articles containing Japanese-language text, Articles with Japanese-language sources (ja), Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, 2006 10th Tsuruya Nanboku Drama Award, Best Play category. Maybe partly because of the TV feature, the late-afternoon deli counters were thronged with people. Trumps performative macho is scaring voters in both parties away from women candidates. Ikiteru dake de ai was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize,[9] and was later adapted into a 2018 film of the same name. Yukiko Motoya ( , Motoya Yukiko, born July 14, 1979) is a Japanese novelist, playwright, theatre director, and former voice actress. . On Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal, Lisa Hiton [10] Motoya's 2009 novel Ano ko no kangaeru koto wa hen (That Girl's Got Some Strange Ideas) was nominated for the 141st Akutagawa Prize. "The Reason I Carry Biscuits to Offer to Young Boys", trans. Her first story, ""Eriko to zettai,"" appeared in the literary magazine Gunzo in 2002. Our Final Words: A Review of Eternal Sentences by Michael McGriff, Katherine M. Hedeen Your email address will not be published. Readers who are familiar with Japanese folklore, manga, or anime will probably find some of the themes to be mundane - there is much reminiscent of Rumiko Takahashi in the more fantastic stories, like The Dogs or An Exotic Marriage. "In Yukiko Motoya's delightful new story collection, the familiar becomes unfamiliar . They treat the importance of others inner lives as a given. The Lonesome Bodybuilder It also indicates the range of Motoyas storytelling style by unveiling additional powers of suggestion and atmospheric description. and then the short story "The Exotic Marriage" is a whopping eighty five pages long. Or: What really would have happened if Id gotten on the roller coaster that day? New York, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2018. Sign up for our mailing list to get the latest updates on happenings at Maudlin House, and product discounts! or 224 pp. In spite ofin fact, because ofher affection for the odd and comic, Motoyas stories grant sobering insights into the compromises of love and marriage, the fraught pursuit of art and desire, and the dangers of becoming stuck in the wrong version of your life. Motoya wards off fatigue by peppering this buffet of patriarchal cruelty with humorsurprising enough and sharp enough to elicit as many belly laughs as grimaces while reading. "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 . I was folding laundry on the living room floor. by Michael Heller and James Salzman, Zach Savich Lingerie? Back to the gym she goes. Go, Zoromi, go do it for her. He movedthe cat off the space beside him where shed been asleep, and beckoned to me. He seemed to be enjoying eating me up so much that the sensation of it spread to me, and I felt as though I were tasting my own self. Yukiko Motoya ( , Motoya Yukiko, born July 14, 1979) is a Japanese novelist, playwright, theatre director, and former voice actress.She has won numerous Japanese literary and dramatic awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Noma Literary New Face Prize, the Mishima Yukio Prize, the Kenzaburo Oe Prize, the Kishida Kunio Drama Award, and the Tsuruya Nanboku Drama Award. She comes to have a community of people who support her, and her bulging musclesher arms looked huge enough to snap a log in halfearn her a following at the natural-beauty store where she works. Or: Weeping, I swung at her head with a club Id taken off a man Id kicked to the ground? Each time I looked at my husband lying on the couchshe thinks to herselfI had the strange impression I was living with a new kind of organism that would die if it exerted itself in any way. His laziness alarms her more than the migration of his features to new regions of his face. This is abundantly illustrated in "An Exotic Marriage," a novella about a woman, San, who begins to fear that her husband's identity is blending with her own. The Grandfather of New Nature Writing Was a Bird-Loving Poet. The books 11 tales are, in one way or another, about the fettering of freedom. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. The Aesthetics of Cosmic Feminism: A Review of Magda Crnecis FEM, Katherine M. Hedeen Motoyas collection is a bold broadcast: fiction should be wild and daring, and less beholden to the rigors of logic than to the power and potency of surprise. [23] An English version of her play Vengeance can Wait, translated by Kyoko Yoshida and Andy Bragen, premiered in 2008 at the Best of Boroughs Festival in New York City. She 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 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. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Of being just a bit off, like a lingering scent of formaldehyde irony and their sense of being me! Maybe partly because of the TV feature, the late-afternoon deli counters were thronged with.... 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