Her first story, “Eriko to zettai,” appeared in the literary magazine Gunzo in 2002. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theater Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. 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. A newlywed notices that her spouse’s features are beginning to slide around his face to match her own. 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 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. 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.

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).

The lonesome body builder