“We have to accept that we’re responsible for the physical effects they’re experiencing!” a man yells, as the narrator’s girlfriend’s lips produce their own lipstick the narrator tearfully euthanizes her. It’s sadder-more bruising-than a revenge fantasy. In “The Women,” a city’s female population contracts a virus that turns them into homicidal hotties. The narrator, reasoning that “she must be lonely, what with her entire family having been killed by an evil gang,” asks her out, only to find that his new girlfriend is psychotic and in love with her dad. She has glimmering pink hair, she’s an unstoppable ninja, she fights bad guys in the garden every day.

In “How to Burden the Girl,” a thirty-four-year-old recluse spies on the younger woman who has moved in next door. She is typical of Motoya’s women: conferring an excess of personhood on whomever or whatever is at hand, yearning to connect to something that isn’t there.Īt first, “The Lonesome Bodybuilder” appears most interested in chills and moods I needed time for its feminism and its political threads to catch the light. The executive who holds her tongue at the meeting also sees, or dreams that she sees, faces in inanimate objects she suffers from a condition called pareidolia, in which the mind perceives illusory patterns in random stimuli. Lying on the couch, they prompt the “strange impression” of “a new kind of organism that would die if it exerted itself in any way.” There is acid in Motoya’s surrealism: these women will put up with anything! A draft blows through the tales-loneliness, the most spectral emotion. (He “will no doubt be prepared to be swung as hard as it takes to protect your honor.”) The husbands are oppressively thoughtless, moody, domineering. Other women in the book pursue men who are made of straw or advise each other to marry bicycle saddles. “You’re accommodating, San, and before you know it”-she breaks off, as San’s features rearrange themselves to mirror her partner’s. “You should be careful,” her neighbor tells her. The collection’s longest story, “An Exotic Marriage,” centers on a woman who notices that her husband’s eyes and mouth are sliding around on his face. They treat the importance of others’ inner lives as a given.īut too much open-mindedness and empathy can become a kind of permeability, and that gets these characters into trouble. Motoya’s protagonists feel quietly radical in a literary moment that seems particularly interested in unpacking various forms of narcissism. One woman tries to compensate for her husband’s “lack of confidence by listing all my own faults.” A second character, an executive, wishes to speak her mind at a meeting but fears that she hasn’t established herself among her colleagues “as the kind of person who could say that sort of thing.” The tales boil down to the problem of balancing empathy with self-assertion-of both practicing kindness and expressing your own needs, and all while the people around you are behaving like wraiths or aliens. The stories consider how it feels to take other people into account, to be forever calibrating your own words and actions in relation to those nearby. Motoya’s characters tend to be housewives and service workers, and her tales revolve around intimate or faux-intimate relationships. The reader wonders: Am I the strange one?

This normalization gives the stories their irony and their sense of being just a bit off, like a lingering scent of formaldehyde. In “The Lonesome Bodybuilder,” characters correctly identify weird behavior as weird, but they mistake out-of-bounds, supernatural weird for human, “life’s a rich tapestry” weird.

(Several tales allude to “ Kwaidan,” a ghoulish anthology compiled by the folklorist Lafcadio Hearn, in 1904.)

(“I want you to come out of that fitting room with a smile on your face!” the attendant chirps, noting the “slurping, roiling kind of sound” emanating from behind the curtain.) The stories are funny and creepy they have a campfire vibe, a brush of the moonless night. A sales associate at a boutique stays overnight digging up outfits for someone-or some thing-that won’t leave the dressing room. A woman trains as a bodybuilder, adding massive ropes of muscle to her back and shoulders, tripling the width of her neck-and her husband doesn’t notice. Men and women enter into romances with shape-shifters. Many unusual things happen in “ The Lonesome Bodybuilder,” a new collection by the Japanese author Yukiko Motoya. The tales in “The Lonesome Bodybuilder” boil down to the problem of balancing empathy with self-assertion, all while the people around you are behaving like wraiths or aliens.

Moods of a story