Review by New York Times Review
IN YUKIKO MOTOYA'S DELIGHTFUL new story collection, the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Characters change; literally, their facial features move, morph, disappear. Each story begins unsuspectingly - a clerk helps a woman in a changing room, a wife decides to go to the gym - and, from these seemingly realistic setups, the magical and the surreal unfold. In "Fitting Room," the customer never comes out. A day goes by, and the clerk, who stays all night, offers the woman every piece of clothing in the store, then buys her clothes from another boutique to try on. Eventually, the clerk has no option except to haul the fitting room out of the store. If the reader has trouble picturing this, there is a cartoon diagram to assist. Motoya wins over her audience by pushing the absurd to extremes. Perhaps the most resonant stories are those about marriage; Motoya (a playwright as well as an author) excels in putting husband and wife through unusual trials. At face value, the stories are fun and funny to read, but weightier questions lurk below the surface. In the title story, a husband watches a boxing match and asks his wife what she thinks of his body. The wife tries her best to boost his ego, fails, then decides to take up bodybuilding. She commits to it, lifting regularly and consuming protein powder, yet while others notice her transformation, her husband does not. Even when she poses in front of him in a micro bikini, her hair now short, her body filled out and covered in tanning oil, he asks: "What's that? Lingerie?" Back to the gym she goes. To get at the deeper themes of strained marriages, traditional gender roles and love, Motoya subverts tropes and allows her characters to inhabit bizarre and metaphorical trajectories. The collection's longest story, "An Exotic Marriage," is more of a novella, and explores physical transformation as a metaphor for the shifting of identities in a relationship. A married couple begin to look like each other, and the wife wonders how she can prevent it. She can no longer recognize the husband's face; he starts to do housework. In a brilliant analogy, she compares marriage to a snake ball: "There are two snakes, and they each start cannibalizing the other one's tail. And they eat and they eat at exactly the same speed, until they're just two heads making a ball, and then they both get eaten up and disappear. I think that's the image I have of marriage." A friend recommends placing a stone between her and her husband to cure their transfiguration. By suggesting the need for a shield within marriage, Motoya conveys the dysfunction she sees in the coexistence of men and women. Other extraordinary examples from the collection: A girlfriend challenges her boyfriend to a duel and turns into a miniskirt-wearing siren; a husband made of straw harps on his wife to take better care of their BMW. The writing itself is to be admired. Where does Motoya find lines like "When I woke up and looked in the mirror, I saw that my face had finally begun to forget who I was"? Or: "What really would have happened if I'd gotten on the roller coaster that day? I have the feeling I would have met a version of myself I don't know now" ? Or: "Weeping, I swung at her head with a club I'd taken off a man I'd kicked to the ground"? Certainly the style will remind readers of the Japanese authors Banana Yoshimoto and Sayaka Murata, but the stories themselves - and the logic, or lack thereof, within their sentences - are reminiscent, at least to this reader, of Joy Williams and Rivka Galchen and George Saunders. WEIKE WANG is the author of "Chemistry."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
In Motoya's first book to appear in English, the celebrated Japanese novelist, playwright, and media personality presents 11 offbeat modern fables that confront loneliness and selfhood. Her protagonists include an aspiring advertising executive, an aging columnist, and a recluse living among dogs. Many characters struggle to balance their social awkwardness with their ambitions. A clothing-store clerk resolves to satisfy a customer who's been in the changing room for hours, and a hopeless underachiever adores a superhuman girl tasked with defending her family from violent henchmen. Other characters encounter curious strangers, including a man who predicts the fates of passersby during a typhoon and agent-like imps who rampage through the local market. Marital volatility is another recurring subject. In the title story, a housewife begins a bodybuilding routine that reshapes her physique and, she hopes, her marriage. And in a novella-length story, a woman is convinced that she and her husband are becoming identical. 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.--Jonathan Fullmer Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 "QA" 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
