Winner of the Akutagawa Prize and the Kenzaburo Oe Prize, these eleven surreal tales, set in the offices, zoos, bus stops, boutiques, and homes of contemporary Japan "are reminiscent, at least to this reader, of Joy Williams and Rivka Galchen and George Saunders" (Weike Wang, The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice). In the English-language debut of one of Japan’s most fearlessly inventive young writers 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. 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. Motoya's stories are neon bright with touches of darkness, like Saturday morning cartoons that occasionally veer into the grotesque." —Lauren Peugh, Powell's Books (Portland, OR) "There's weird and then there's 'oh my goodness, what the heck did I just read?' weird. The stories collected in Yukiko Motoya's The Lonesome Bodybuilder belong to the latter group. These stories are incisive explorations of domestic life fraught with tension and 'out-of-left-field' bizarre field trips into the dark woods of the mind. Immersive, captivating—I can't get enough of Yukiko Motoya!" —Uriel Perez, BookPeople (Austin, TX) "This collection had me riveted from beginning to end. Each story was a beautiful and intriguing blend of surrealism and the mundane, and nothing of Motoya's succinct language is lost in the translation. An excellent escape book." —Lauren Nopenz Fairley, Curious Iguana (Frederick, MD) "To call these stories simply strange is to do them a disservice. They are uncanny in that uncomfortably familiar way, when ordinary objects turn out to be magical, and the world does not quite work the way we think it does. And yet when magic occurs, you feel not at all surprised, as if this weirdness is what you had expected all along." —Anton Bogomazov, Politics and Prose (Washington, D.C.) "I loved these quirky, unique stories and can't wait to see more from this author!" —Christine Onorati, WORD Bookstore (Brooklyn, NY) "Wunderbar! Hints of Saunders and very reminiscent of Murakami but stands solidly on its own two feet. 'An Exotic Marriage,' 'How to Burden the Girl,' and 'Q&A' all blew me away with their originality, and more importantly, their assault on outdated social expectations. Yet again, an Akutagawa winner that I love!" —Randy Schiller, Left Bank Books (St. Louis, MO) "The stories in this collection are funny and unnerving, mundane and surreal. It's been a minute since I read something that so truly captured how horrific love and the desire to feel seen can be. I laug