Yukiko Motoi's novels and stories combine magical realism, absurdity, ancient myths and Shinto legends. As a result, modern Japanese reality appears before the reader with its most fabulous, and most importantly, allegorical side. Here men and women are not equal creatures, but different species. And where they seem to merge into one, believe me, it only seems so. The most unusual book by one of the most unusual authors of modern Japan in 2015 received the highest literary award in the Land of the Rising Sun - the Akutagawa Prize. The strange syncretic genre in which Yukiko Motoya writes her prose is tempting to be defined as “magical grotesque.” A kind of Japanese black humor, where the wormhole of any situation is brought to the point of mystical, otherworldly absurdity.