the lonesome bodybuilder by yukiko motoya

With this in mind, I’m excited that all of you reading this brief introduction are going to have the chance to read the title story from Motoya’s new collection, a story about a woman who decides for a very good reason that she should become a bodybuilder. Isn’t “normal” a strange way to feel about anything - particularly the shifting, absurd, hilarious precarity of our lives? It is this last point, the way in which these strange stories nevertheless manage to feel oddly cozy, oddly domestic, that points toward what is truly startling about Motoya’s work: against a background of abnormal happenings, what begins to feel Weirdest is the “normal” feeling the narrator brings to these situations, the same “normal” feeling we have as we go about our work, our chores, our relationships.

But what’s oddest about these stories is the way they seem to insist on their own reasonable nature: unflaggingly sober and charmingly restrained, they are Kafkaesque fables fed through the sturdy heart of a Raymond Carver narrator. They have the subterranean psychological allure of fairy tale.

Yes, the stories have odd and absurd elements - like the one where the wife notices that her husband’s features are beginning to shift to resemble her own, or the one about the saleslady whose customer won’t come out of the changing room and also, incidentally, may not be human - that remind me of the magicality of Aimee Bender or surreality of Judy Budnitz. Yukiko Motoya’s The Lonesome Bodybuilder, the Japanese writer’s first collection of short stories to be translated and published in America, is a glorious example of the Weirdly Weird thriving in its natural element. Membership in this category is ephemeral, transient, and determined not just by the properties of the work itself, but by the work’s legibility in the surrounding world - for as more works take inspiration from the first pioneering Weirdo, that particular variety of weirdness becomes commonplace, comprehensible, customary. It’s a lone leaf at the end of a lonely, weird twig. Difficult to categorize and even more difficult to explain, it’s not clearly part of a school or trend or ideology.

The “Weirdly Weird” is a category that a work can belong to only when it’s an outlier. Alexandra Kleeman recommends “The Lonesome Bodybuilder” by Yukiko MotoyaĪs a connoisseur of the weird, I encounter a great many stories told by weird characters, or set in weird places, or driven by weird happenings - so it’s always a thrill to encounter a piece of literature that’s weird in a new way, “Weirdly Weird,” so to speak.

The lonesome bodybuilder by yukiko motoya