A lonely housewife takes up bodybuilding. A shop assistant tries to find the perfect outfit for a customer she never sees who’s locked in the fitting room. Broken umbrellas make people fly in typhoons, small musical instruments fall out of straw husbands and women duel with their male partners in the night - this is Yukiko Motoya’s short story collection, Picnic in the Storm!
I quite liked The Lonesome Bodybuilder though the ending was a bit of a flop. Overall though I liked aspects of the stories more than the stories as a whole. The surreal moments from The Straw Husband, where a woman discovers her husband is made of straw, and An Exotic Marriage, where a woman realises she and her husband are starting to look identical, were interesting. The fuck-it-ness of the dying Agony Aunt’s last column in Q&A was amusing.
I can see what Motoya’s going for thematically in most of her stories: an exploration of identity and gender dynamics in modern Japanese relationships, particularly from the women’s perspective and their experience of the disappointing realities of marriage with the expectation of the wife to be subservient to the husband. And while that kind of artiness can win literary prizes, which they have done, I didn’t find them all that engaging or impressive to read.
Husbands can take wives for granted, being grown-up doesn’t mean you’ve got it all figured out, yup, heard it all before! And the more obtuse stories’ meanings were totally lost on me - I’ve no idea what Paprika Joe or The Dogs were supposed to be about.
Many of the stories in Picnic in the Storm are well-written, some of the imagery is creative and fun but few are especially memorable or inspired and I wasn’t very taken with the collection overall.
No comments:
Post a Comment