Haruki Murakami has tended to crowd out other Japanese fiction writers in the American market. Not today. Yukiko Motoya’s story collection “The Lonesome Bodybuilder,” her first in English, will appeal to readers who appreciate Murakami’s surrealism, but who lament his lack of attention to fully realized gender dynamics. In the worlds Motoya describes, strangeness is inseparable from those dynamics, which she takes to be worthy of attention.

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