The Lonesome Body Builder by Yukiko Motoya
Review of The Lonesome Body Builder by Yukiko Motoya, translated into English by Asa Yoneda
“Life’s not worth living if you’re not tending to the whims and demands of a high-maintenance lover!”
The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya (2018). Published in English by Soft Skull Press.
I’m still not quite sure how exactly how I ran into this novel, or why I even was compelled to read it in the first place. I absolutely hate fitness to the point where I will avoid fitness-related things like the plague—part of it is trauma from a past relationship, as well as a past of having a bad relationship with my own body—and so I wonder what exactly spurred me to open it up.
Perhaps it was because I was very into short story collections at the time, or because I’ve been trying to consume more and more Japanese literature because it tends to hit one of my sweet spots in the literary world.
Like many women writing in Japan right now, Motoya tends to go to themes focusing on the everyday lives of ordinary people.
Her characters have a unique perspective on gender dynamics in Japanese society and tend to work mundane jobs or have quote-on-quote mundane lives. And as a wannabe anthropologist who does ethnography on the everyday mundane lives of people, this skewers into my specialty areas.
Let’s dive into the review, shall we?
Content
Our first story sets the tone for the entire collection. Titled “The Lonesome Bodybuilder,” an unsatisfied wife decides she’s going to become a bodybuilder to see if she can turn her life around. She defies the expectations of society as she begins to build muscle, leading to a tragic event happening at her work, but her husband, who is depicted as slightly dull and dimwitted, doesn’t even notice that something has changed about her.
In many societies around the world, especially in Japanese society, women are expected to become subservient and not doing something like our narrator has done. By beefing up her body, she has allowed us to escape the narrative of who and what she should be, literally paving her own path through brute muscle and force.
After this story, I found kind of a lull until we hit two specific stories: “The Women” and “Q & A.” In “The Women,” we see women becoming extreme gender stereotypes of what is expected of women, and then they begin to challenge their male counterparts to duels.
There’s a lot to unpack in this story, but it all begins to make sense as you immediately move onto the next story which is about a supermodel who is past her prime years. Now an aging woman seen as undesirable to the world, we are slowly coming to realize the expectations of women and beauty, as well as youthfulness, in the society that they’re inhabiting.
The actual writing in the stories themselves wasn’t terrible; Moyoka tends to blend together elements of fantasy and absurdism in order to make a point about the status of her women. All of the narrators are women, and almost all of them have something to say, whether explicit or indirect, about the world that they live in.
But if you told me which stories I could pick out that I genuinely liked, I honestly would only mention the three that I’ve written about here already. The very second story in the collection implies an alien woman has come to a designer boutique to try on the clothes for hours and days on end, and it was in stories like these I found myself getting annoyed and being like get to the point already.
I think a key problem for me is that the majority of these stories tend to be rather on the shorter end, clocking between ten and twenty pages max, and then the short story “The Exotic Marriage” is a whopping eighty five pages long. I didn’t like that story much at all—it shouldn’t have been in this collection.
Some Googling I did found out that this was actually published as a novella in Japan, which makes so much more sense to me. It should be a full-blown novel or a novella, not trapped within a short story collection. My mentality when reading something that is dubbed a short story collection is that they’ll be under thirty-five pages each roughly, and eighty-five just stretched my limit.
Overall Thoughts
I love weird literature. I really do. But these stories weren’t just landing right for me. While it may not be my cup of tea, I’m sure that it might be someone else’s for sure. Does this mean that the stories were bad? No, not at all. The writing was good and quirky, had a lot of personality to it. I just wasn’t the right audience for it at the end of the day.
