The Lonesome Bodybuilder: Stories

The Lonesome Bodybuilder: Stories

<b>Winner of the Akutagawa Prize and the Kenzaburo Oe Prize</b><br> <b>A <i>New York Times Book Review</i> Editors' Choice</b><br><br> <b>"In Yukiko Motoya€s delightful new story collection, the familiar becomes unfamiliar . . . 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, <i>The New York Times Book Review</i></b><br><br> A housewife takes up bodybuilding and 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, and 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.<br><br> In these eleven stories, the individuals who lift the curtains of their orderly homes and workplaces are confronted with the bizarre, the grotesque, the fantastic, the alien€•and find a doorway to liberation. The English-language debut of one of Japan€s most fearlessly inventive young writers.