Lonesome Bodybuilder on the Light Rail
I WAS TAKING the light rail to downtown San Francisco one morning, trying to shake my mind off of a troubling situation. People I knew had gotten themselves into a muddled, unnecessary muss. A silly win-lose dynamic was being acted out.
I turned my attention to find something to read in my bag. I had a few academic papers about systems design and a collection of short stories I had recently purchased.
I chose the book, flipped to the first story, and began reading.
Fifteen minutes later, after missing a stop, I got off with a winning mood and sense of perspective. The muddle that had occupied my thoughts had receded, allowing me to address it later when I chose to focus on it rather than be distracted by it.
During the two years I lived in Barcelona, Spain, I spent much of my free time reading. While I could’ve been practicing my Spanish more, I had become somewhat addicted to discovering new authors, such as André Gide, Günter Grass, Orhan Pamuk, John Berger, and Margaret Atwood. I encountered these authors during those years. My primary source for books was the Laie Pau Claris Bookshop & Coffee shop1. Reading literature became a central influence.
Literature forever!
The book I’d started reading on the light rail was The Lonesome Bodybuilder: Stories by Yukiko Motoya, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda.
Motoya published her first short story in 2002. Since then, she has been winning literary awards and has been translated into many languages.2
Translator Asa Yoneda described author Yukiko Motoya as, “a playwright-turned-novelist with an acute instinct for the ways in which the surreal can be born from the agonizing awkwardness of everyday life,"3.
One standout review of the book was penned by Katy Waldman, a staff writer for The New Yorker. She observed, “The tales boil down to the problem of balancing empathy with self-assertion—of practicing kindness and expressing one’s own needs, especially when the people around you behave like wraiths or aliens."[^4] Her review is titled The Chills and Moods of Yukiko Motoya’s Quietly Radical Stories.
“Quietly radical” are well-chosen words. The characters embody empathy, and though the stories could culminate in darkness, they don’t. It’s self-assertion, fueled by empathy and not blindly propelling itself, that prevails.
If you appreciate excerpts, here are two passages I enjoyed. The first is from Q&A, a tale about a renowned columnist concluding her cherished advice column.
QA. Problems that come with being an agony aunt?
A. I started to feel that I was continuously giving advice in my daily life, whether I was getting my hair done, or having a meal, or walking a pet. If I was at lunch and dropped my knife under the table, I would ask myself, “Does the classy woman pick it up herself, or does she call a waiter?”; walking down the street, it would be, “Does the sexy woman turn left, or does she turn right?’; while having sex, “Does the woman of our dreams pursue her climax here, or does she wait?”
- p162
And from the short story The Dogs, a mystery involving unusual dogs.
I loved all the dogs equally. At first, I tried naming them one at a time, but I didn’t get very far. I’d never actually liked naming things. I was content just looking into the glossy black of their eyes, which shone as though they’d been fired in a magic kiln. It wasn’t as if the dogs called me by name, after all. But this got to be a little inconvenient, so I came up with names to try out on some of them. I lined up the dogs in front of the fireplace and told them to bark if they heard a name they liked. Then I held up the collars I’d fashioned and, looking in their eyes, called out their names one by one.
“First up, Early Morning."
Heh heh heh heh.
“The Day the Appliances Arrived.”
Heh heh heh heh.
“Pastrami.”
Heh heh heh… Yap.
The dog stuck his tongue out deferentially. I place the collar marked PASTRAMI around his neck…
- p171
Each story is on average 11 pages long, excluding the 60-page outlier An Exotic Marriage, an award-winning story.
The titles of the 11 stories are:
- The Lonesome BodyBuilder
- The Fitting Room – first line, “She’d gone in, so there was no way she wasn’t coming out again.”
- Typhoon
- I Called You by Name
- An Exotic Marriage – “One day, I realized that I was starting to look just like my husband.”
- Paprika Jiro
- How to Burden the Girl
- The Woman – “There was nothing to be done. No matter how many times I asked why, all she would tell me was that she was challenging me to a duel.”
- Q&A
- The Dogs
- The Straw Husband – “Her husband ran lightly ahead of her, almost as if he was pacesetting a race.”
Motoya included a small drawing in The Fitting Room, which reminded me of a sketch a theatre director might make to quickly convey a set design. I wish she had added more of her drawings.
Read the collection. Literature reminds us that people are funny and complicated, kind, capable of evil, and very much able to be confused or act in confusing ways.
Look for the book at your local bookstore or get it from Amazon.
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Her official bio for the book reads: 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, and Chinese, and her stories have been published in English in Granta, Words Without Borders, Tender, and Catapult. Link ↩︎