A woman returns home from the supermarket. Her husband, who does not have the body of a fighter, is watching a boxing match.
She marvels at the bloody bodies of the men onscreen. She reckons with the meaning of her interest. Why has she never watched this before?
“I always do that,” she thinks. “I decide who I am, and never consider other possibilities. I’ve been like that since middle school. The time I went to the amusement park with my friends and decided that a quiet girl like me wouldn’t like roller coasters. I was the only one who didn’t get on the ride.”
The next day, she starts bodybuilding. She doesn’t want to fight. She wants muscle.
And as she swells and downs protein and swells and downs protein, as she finds body oil and a posing bikini, as she grows stronger and stronger, her husband doesn’t notice anything different.
This is the first story in Yukiko Motoya’s collection of newly translated short fiction, The Lonesome Bodybuilder.
Things get stranger from there, the kind of strange that makes you question the concept of strangeness. Does it enter only in banal moments, when a boxing match is on a television, or when a quiet wife becomes obsessed with bodybuilding overnight, or when her meek, insecure husband doesn’t notice?
Does it enter when an unseen customer won’t come out of her dressing room? Or when an employee stays in the store overnight to help, then buys mountains of clothes from other stores for the customer to try on, then pulls the dressing room out of the store and up a hill with the customer inside? Or is it when we first realize the customer might not be human? PLEASE READ
The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya, from Soft Skull Press
