{"id":8052,"date":"2019-01-08T11:43:06","date_gmt":"2019-01-08T11:43:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8052"},"modified":"2019-02-27T13:02:23","modified_gmt":"2019-02-27T13:02:23","slug":"picnic-in-the-storm-by-yukiko-motoya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8052","title":{"rendered":"Picnic in the Storm by Yukiko Motoya"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Translated by Asa Yoneda<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Corsair 10 January 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

224pp, hardback, \u00a312.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Winner in 2013 of the Kenzaburo Prize (for this collection), and in 2016 of the Akutagawa Prize, Yukiko Motoya has been mentioned in dispatches for some time as a startling new voice in fiction.\u00a0 Her stories mix an almost deadpan ordinariness with entertaining flights of fancy that should lift the sternest critic off her feet.\u00a0 Magritte meets Murakami in tale after tale of the oddest things happening in the very path of daily life.<\/p>\n

In \u2018The Lonesome Bodybuilder\u2019, an unambitious and self-dismissive young woman (\u2018a quiet girl like me\u2019) who lives with a driven, perfectionist and distinctly inattentive husband breaks out of her passive norm with a programme of bodybuilding.\u00a0 Only when she has reached colossal proportions can she show him her real feelings.<\/p>\n

This riffing on insecurity continues in \u2018Fitting Room\u2019, an outlandish story of the invisible boutique customer who never emerges.\u00a0 The sales assistant wonders if \u2018she\u2019 is just having one of those crises brought on by fitting rooms, where you \u2018wonder\u2026whether your entire life up to that point has been an embarrassing mistake\u2019. \u00a0The truth proves somewhat surprising: is the customer even human?<\/p>\n

In subsequent stories, businessmen are borne aloft by their umbrellas; a bulging curtain distracts an advertising executive; men in suits attack a street market.\u00a0 To this reader, too many of these little fantasias are inconsequential, inconclusive.\u00a0 Motoya is at her best in the longest story, \u2018An Exotic Marriage\u2019, and in the last, \u2018The Straw Husband\u2019, in each of which she explores and expresses the weird forms of alienation that can be experienced in this most conventional of living-arrangements.\u00a0 The collection ends with an argument, as tiny musical instruments pour out of the hapless husband\u2019s husk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

Yukiko Motoya has been mentioned in dispatches for some time as a startling new voice in fiction. Her stories mix an almost deadpan ordinariness with entertaining flights of fancy that should lift the sternest critic off her feet. Magritte meets Murakami in tale after tale of the oddest things happening in the very path of daily life […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8052"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8052\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8055,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8052\/revisions\/8055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}