Yukiko Motoya

Yukiko Motoya is a Japanese novelist and playwright born in 1979 in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture. She is also active in theater, having founded her own company. Her fiction is known for its surrealist elements, its dark humor, and its exploration of marriage, identity, and the strangeness lurking beneath the surface of everyday Japanese life. Motoya is the author of several story collections and novels. She won the Akutagawa Prize in 2015 for her story 'Irui konin tan' (An Exotic Marriage). Her international reputation was established by the English-language publication of the story collection The Lonesome Bodybuilder (Ikenie to Yuki no Hime to), translated by Asa Yoneda, which gathered her most celebrated stories and won enthusiastic international readership. Her fiction is characterized by a domestic surrealism: ordinary situations — marriage, work, social occasions — that gradually reveal themselves to be deeply strange. Her stories are comic, unsettling, and deeply felt, and she is regarded as one of the most original voices in contemporary Japanese fiction. Motoya continues to write for both page and stage and is a significant figure in the overlap between Japanese literary fiction and experimental theater.