Her characters seem to be searching for the strangest, and most estranged, parts of themselves. Motoya, in Asa Yoneda’s subtle and unobtrusive translation, never uses the word 'yearning', but this story, like so many others, is saturated with a sense of longing. At 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. 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. But too much open-mindedness and empathy can become a kind of permeability, and that gets these characters into trouble. They treat the importance of others’ inner lives as a given.

Motoya’s protagonists feel quietly radical in a literary moment that seems particularly interested in unpacking various forms of narcissism.

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 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. characters correctly identify weird behavior as weird, but they mistake out-of-bounds, supernatural weird for human, 'life’s a rich tapestry' weird. The stories are funny and creepy they have a campfire vibe, a brush of the moonless night.

The lonesome bodybuilder