My husband is from another species

Original Language: JNumon

Títutulus original: Irui konin tan (anomal marriage tan)

Translation: Jordi Fibilia and Keiko Takahashi

Year of publication: 2016

Valoración: It is allowed to read

Yukiko Motoya is an interesting figure in the contemporary Japanese literary panorama. Not only has he won multiple literary awards, including Akutagawa, but also founded his own theater company, where she exercises as a playwright and director. If you enter your website (http://www.motoyayukiko.com/), just by seeing the posters of the works you have mounted, you can realize that the issues you address are not at all conventional. In addition, they are usually represented in a way, say, exotic. However, I found nothing of that eccentricity in the stories included in this book.

The longest story, my husband is from another species, is the most interesting. The premise is promising: a woman realizes that her husband looks more and more like her. Not only in habits or expressions (something normal in a couple that has been married for many years), but also physically, as if it were a kind of reptilian mimicry. The gradual metamorphosis of the husband seems to serve a subconscious manipulation, in which the protagonist, now, loses the will and acts by emulating her husband’s behavior.

The story gives to think about various issues, from mythology and folklore, to living issues such as the hyperindyvidation of society, the inertia of routine, the lack of confrontation, immaturity or the evasion of responsibilities of adult life. Of course, these are personal interpretations: all this is buried under several layers of absurd and fantastic situations. Without spoiler, the end was not what I expected. The proposal that was so stimulating was so diluted that I finished the story as I had begun, without greater consequence. It seemed like an experiment, if entertaining, failed.

The other stories, much shorter, have fantastic and/or paranormal elements with a BlackMirroresco air. Although they present disturbing or disturbing situations (any emotion caused by reading is more than welcome), the lack of climax and the open finals left me somewhat frustrated.

Motoya writes in a way that maintains interest, with a style that balances the strange and everyday. Although it does not always manage to close the ideas he poses, his literary proposal was somewhat refreshing. ‘My husband is from another species’ maybe not dazzle, but it does suggest a singular voice, which, in these times, is already enough.