THE LONESOME BODY BUILDER by Yukiko Motoya

Asa Yoneda (Translator), 2018

This is a collection of alien short stories with recurring themes of body transformation, relationship, and folklore curses – the幽霊 (Yūrei, ghost in Japanese or yōulíng in Mandarin). The first story didn’t quite click, but I’m glad I pushed through three more stories  because the fourth – An Exotic Marriage – was truly magnificent.

A housewife alarmed at the realization that she had grown to look increasingly like her husband. A condition called 夫妻臉 (fūqī liǎn, translated to “husband and wife face” in Mandarin). There is the equivalent, tướng phu thê in Vietnamese, or 夫婦の顔 fuufu no kao in Japanese, so it might be an Asian thing. 夫妻臉 meant something along the line of “congrats! You have found soul mates” or “you two look like you complement each other / get along well.” This story was about the flip side of the coin. Yukiko Motoya used the imagery of two snakes eating each other to describe self-incineration. Her heroine was being gobbled up. She was plagued with this bleak premonition while swallowing bits of an eel bento. Magical realism at its best, in less than 100 pages.  

After this transformative peak, I also found How to Burden the Girl (folklore curse remade) and The Women quite enjoyable. The rest didn’t quite amount to memorable entertainment, subjectively.   

*The Lonesome Bodybuilder is also released as Picnic in the Storm by Kodansha.

THE ERASERS by Alain Robbe-Grillet

Richard Howard (Translator), 1994

Someone shared how he had despised reading Alain Robbe-Grillet in college but later developed a drastic U-turn, rereading at 40 and becoming a full-fledged Robbe-Grillet collector. I house this book on the shelf because that might happen to me some twenty years down the road.

After a couple chapters – especially after the scene where Wallas (one of the narrators, a young inspector) keeps returning to the same intersection on his first morning in this foreign town, my impression is that the book will be much more attractive as a black and white movie. I feel trapped inside Minotaur’s maze, staring at the symbols (the terrorist association, a target killed at exactly 19h30, the eraser shopping). There’s nothing wrong with that, if such a vibe is the unintended consequence of forging a new narrative foorm, where the narrator is no longer omnipotent and the chronology no longer sequential. Just a laborious process going from cover to cover, subjectively TBD 20 years later.