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. Picnic in the Storm is the English-language debut of one of Japan's most fearlessly inventive young writers.

Biographie de Yukiko Motoya

Yukiko Motoya was born in Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan in 1979. After moving to Tokyo to study drama, she started the Motoya Yukiko Theatre Company, whose plays she wrote and directed. Her frst story,'Eriko to zettai', appeared in the literary magazine Gunzo in 2002. Motoya won the Noma Prize for New Writers for Warm Poison in 2011 ; the Kenzaburõ Oe Prize for Picnic in the Storm in 2013 ; the Mishima Yukio Prize for How She Learned to Love Herself in 2014 ; and Japan's most prestigious literary prize, the Akutagawa Prize, for An Exotic Marriage in 2016.
Her books have been published or are forthcoming in French, Norwegian, Spanish and Chinese, and her stories have been published in English in Granta, Words Without Borders, Tender and Catapult. Asa Yoneda was born in Osaka, Japan, and lives in Bristol, UK In addition to Yukiko Motoya, she has translated works by Banana Yoshimoto, Aoko Matsuda and Natsuko Kuroda.