The Millions, Most Anticipated in the Second Half of 2018 'In 11 short stories, Yukiko Motoya pulls back the curtain from everyday lives, to reveal that beneath the most mundane lies a world bizarre and alien.' - Bustle, 1 of 11 Most Anticipated Books Published by Indie Presses to Have on Your Radar in 2018 'This inventive and chilling volume will have U.S. 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 bodybuilder stories