Picnic in the Storm

A housewife takes up bodybuilding and sees radical changes to her physique – which her workaholic husband fails to notice. A boy waits at a bus stop, mocking businessmen struggling to keep their umbrellas open in a typhoon – until an old man shows him that they hold the secret to flying. A woman working 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 newly wed notices that her husband’s features are beginning to slide around his face – to match her own. 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, through it, find a way to liberation. Winner of the Kenzaburo Oe Prize, Picnic in the Storm (published in the US as The Lonesome Bodybuilder) is the English-language debut of one of Japan’s most fearless young writers.