Where Did Yukiko Motoya Go?
eight long years after the publication of The Lonesome Bodybuilder, I finally had a chance to read her new novel in English, Love at Least
In 2018, I kept seeing the same four books. They were recommended on every purchase from Amazon, and when I went into Barnes and Noble, they were somewhere on the shelf, their covers so distinctive I could recognize them from fifty feet away.
They were all books by contemporary Japanese women writers. Two were written by authors both named Kawakami: Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami and Ms. Ice Sandwich by Mieko Kawakami. Then there was Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. And finally, there was The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya, a short story collection, which was the first of the four I bought.
At the time, I was learning Japanese and reading a lot of Japanese literature, hoping to take a trip to Tokyo. I never made it to Japan and settled for teaching a course on modern Japanese short fiction instead.
After the first few pages of the title story in Motoya’s collection, I fell in love. All of the above authors deal with modern alienation, but Motoya was the one I liked best. Her prose was effortless, her images precise, and her willingness to get weird and surreal—no doubt influenced by writers like Kobo Abe—made her very much an author for me.
Those other three writers have gone on to be much more widely available in the American market, with anywhere from four to eleven books available in English. But Motoya had one—and only one—for eight years, even though there was a sizable back catalog of her work waiting in Japan. And The Lonesome Bodybuilder seemed to have done well—at least critically—so why wasn’t there something else of hers to read? If I had kept up with my Japanese, I could have tracked down the Japanese editions and read them in the original, but I was also working four jobs at the time, so instead, I read those other authors and waited.
Now, with the release of Love at Least, Motoya’s latest from Soft Skull Press, the wait is over, and it doesn’t disappoint.
Originally published as Ikiteru Dakede, Ai (Just Being Alive is Love) in 2006 and adapted into a Japanese film of the same name in 2018, Soft Skull smartly pitches Love at Leastas The Bell Jar for the twenty-first century. It follows twenty-five-year-old Yasuko as she deals with bipolar disorder, something that she seems to have inherited from her mother. The novel covers a month-long period of depression and hypersomnia. After being inadvertently drawn into a workplace love triangle, which she has no interest in, Yasuko lashes out at her coworkers and gets fired from her part-time supermarket gig, leaving her with very few options.
She’s the kind of woman who struggles to keep a job for long, believing “no matter how many times [she] had tried to stick with [one]…[she] always ended up quitting.” Without money, she’s trapped in a relationship with Tsunaki, her well-meaning, if aloof, boyfriend, a spectacled thirty-two-year-old editor-in-chief of a small magazine, often overworked and worn out, sometimes sleeping in the office to meet deadlines. Yasuko describes him in ways that are both mean-spirited and comic, calling him a “moron” who “cares about books so much” and “groans on the toilet like a Mongolian throat singer, hitting both high and low notes at the same time.” He’s a kind of consolation prize for a Yasuko who “feels less a woman than a thrown-in-towel with legs and a pair of tits.”
“Novels,” Yasuko remarks in the narration, “are for narcissists,” and what makes the novel work so well is how Motoya renders mental illness as both a symptom of and a reaction to modern life, a theme she explored so well in the stories of The Lonesome Bodybuilder. For example, when Yasuko starts to grow tired of her self-imposed hikikomori lifestyle, unable to keep a job or do any housework, she makes a run to the grocery store, hoping to make dinner rather than buy another bento. Motoya writes:
Even though I should be standing on firm ground, I sense nothing beneath my feet, nothing around me that I can reach out and touch; the sweet delusion of being completely unmoored from everything threatens to crush me.
In fact, “unmoored” appears more than once throughout the novel, and it seems to be a key metaphor for understanding Yasuko. She is alienated not only from societal expectations of womanhood, having to choose between being a working woman or a housewife, but from everyone else, believing she exists “a million light-years apart…the girl who pukes green vomit, completely unmoored from everything.” She often wonders how she’ll survive, frequently contemplates turning to sex work, and seems unable to fit in anywhere.
When she gets a job at a small Italian restaurant run by former yankīs (rebellious youth or juvenile delinquents), there’s a glimmer of hope for her as Owner, the owner, and Mizuki, the head hostess and Owner’s young wife, take her under their wing. They give her the revealing nickname of Gakkin (which likely comes from the word gakki meaning “starving ghost” or “brat”) and embrace her as part of the family. They tell her things like “even if you can’t do it alone, together we will find a way” and “a sickness like depression comes from only one thing: loneliness.”
Yet just when Yasuko starts to feel at home, her employers suggest she “write a report” about her depression as though she’s a subject for study. And worse still, they can’t understand her fear of a bidet malfunctioning, “the water pressure [becoming] crazy strong.”
Of course, there’s no cure for her illness: not the restaurant nor her boyfriend nor her online community of hypersomniacs. She’s a woman who”
feel[s] like everyone is somehow onto [her]…. while [others] dealt with it by just keeping things at arm’s length, [she] puked and pelted through the streets with blood streaming from [her] head…. yelling “Screw Parco!”
Time and time again, the novel demonstrates the world is not meant for us, how social convention and societal expectations impede our own sense of humanity and disconnect us from each other. Yet Yasuko’s response to the horror that is modern life feels so earned and righteous, even if it makes her unpredictable and childish.
What amazes me most about Love at Least is that it was originally published in 2006, yet it feels surprisingly current. The way it observes the loneliness of our lives in the age of the internet and cell phones reminds me of the similarly hypersomniac narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a modern weird girl lit classic.
It’s strange reading something published two decades ago and finding it so prophetic, as though nothing has changed in the last twenty years. But that’s not true. If anything, it’s only gotten worse: we’re all addicted to our phones, caught in the throes of a loneliness epidemic. It’s enough to make writers like Banana Yoshimoto say, “If I were young today, I might have already killed myself.”
Motoya’s long absence from the English-language literary world feels unjustified. She’s just as cutting and surreal as Murata, just as feminist as Mieko Kawakami, and just as tender and earnest as Hiromi Kawakami. Her work interrogates similar themes, and her critique of modern life seems as necessary now as it was twenty years ago—maybe even more so. She deserves to be part of that conversation. Hopefully, the wait for her next book doesn’t take another eight years; otherwise, I’ll really have to start practicing Japanese again.