‘Typhoon’ has an old man in a bus shelter telling stories and pointing out the salarymen in the street about to take flight (really…) while in ‘Paprika Jiro’ market stalls are destroyed by a horde of mysterious people dressed in black, who may not be people at all. One of the many writers praising Motoya in the blurbs is Hiromi Kawakami, and there are several stories here that have hints of some of her trademark whimsy and oddness. Confusingly, there’s also a UK edition out under the title Picnic in the Storm – the two books contain the same stories, so don’t get confused!

The pieces range in length from a couple of six-page sketches and some standard-length stories to a few longer ones, including the novella-length ‘An Exotic Marriage’, for which Motoya received the famed Akutagawa Prize in 2015. Yukiko Motoya’s The Lonesome Bodybuilder (translated by Asa Yoneda, review copy courtesy of Soft Skull Press) is a collection of eleven stories taken from two Japanese books. It’s a book I really enjoyed, but there is one thing I didn’t like about it – this is certainly a work you should *not* judge by its cover 😉 My latest post looks at an excellent collection of short stories by a new (in English…) writer, one whose work will remind many readers of some other well-known J-Lit favourites. After a slightly disappointing experience with my last Women in Translation Month read, I did what I often do and went to Japanese literature for some comfort reading, and luckily that did the trick.

The lonesome bodybuilder stories