Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales

Sometimes the strangeness of modern life sneaks up on you. Picador has a given Revenge the packing one would expect of a slasher movie, and a title that is ominous, not so much of dread but of cliche. The first paragraphs one encounters in the book seem light. In Revenge, Ogawa begins us with a strange tale about a woman waiting at a bakery. The setting is modern, and yet it is impossible to place in any particular country or time beyond that. The narration begins: “It was a beautiful Sunday. The sky was a cloudless dome of sunlight. Out on the square, leaves fluttered in a gentle breeze along the pavement. Everything seemed to glimmer with a faint luminescence: the roof of the ice-cream stand, the faucet on the drinking fountain, the eyes of a stray cat, even the base of the clock tower covered with pigeon droppings. “Families and tourists strolled through the square, enjoying the weekend. Squeaky sounds could be heard from a man off in the corner, who was twisting balloon animals. A circle of children watched him, entranced. Nearby, a woman sat on a bench knitting. Somewhere a horn sounded. A flock of pigeons burst into the air, and startled a baby who began to cry. The mother hurried over to gather the child in her arms.You could gaze at this perfect picture all day—an afternoon bathed in light and comfort—and perhaps never notice a single detail out of place, or missing.” (1-2)The description lyrical and light, as if whimsical sound with a discordant buzz humming in the back. As the first story unfolds, we find ourselves with a woman grim celebration of her dead son while waiting on a baker who seemingly does not arrive. There is little action animating the pieced. Insatead, the horror of the events as well as melancholia sneak in distorted like a memory. The next story, “Fruit Juice” is a seemingly unrelated tale which shifts the reader to focus on a woman dealing with her estranged father and asking a male friend to accompany her while some unknown grief develops around them. As the story unfolds, you realize that baker in the first story is the girl in the second and the fairy-tale like fugue of characters and images begins to spiral. The story ends on an image of kiwis in an office park and a woman stuffing her face to avoid sadness. The strangeness of the image forces you realize it will reappear.This technique is other-worldly and leads to a narrative style where a sense of dread and unease develops slowly. It has a flaw though. Even as characters and their gender shift, the same fugue voice is moved through. This often makes it hard to tell if the narrator is male or female, old or young, or was a minor character encountered in a prior story. This flattening of the voice, which may be in the original or may be a function of the translation, emphasizes the fugue-state of consciousness and dread. It, however, de-emphasizes the specific feel of each character. Proxies for the writer enter into the story, but it is often hard to extract out the specific voice from the meta-fictive elements and as a result both blend into each other and can be lost in confusion. Still, Ogawa is aware of this flaw and even comments on it through a proxy narrator: “The prose was unremarkable, as were the plot and characters, but there was an icy undercurrent running under her words, and I found myself wanting to plunge into it again and again” (148). Novels that are so highly aware of there artifice are generally take a lighter note.Still this technique crescendos in the middle building to two profoundly dark stories: “Sewing for the Heart” and the “Museum of Torture.” both of which have major plot elements that cannot be spoiled, but function as both meta-fictive and thematic clue for Ogawa. In it is these stories where things Ogawa moves us into a fugue state that is like torture: “For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls, drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they literally explode, and every sensation in the body is absorbed into that one spot on the forehead—indeed, you come to feel that you are nothing but a forehead, into which a fine needle is being forced millimeter by millimeter. You can’t sleep or even speak, hypnotized by a suffering that is greater than any mere pain. In general, the victim goes mad before a day has passed.” (93-94)All of these stories involve both tragedy and beauty in a way which makes the conflation of the two ultimately malignant and yet also unavoidable.This is not without flaws, however, as the second half of the book is weaker than the first, and it becomes hard to tell the gender or age of the various voices because, at least in this translations, the voices are not as distinctly different. This can be a problem for a collection of stories so dependent on first person narratives. The fairy tale quality and even the meta-fictive overlapping, however, thematically justifies some of this departure and Ogawa’s herself seems aware of it: “The prose was unremarkable, as were the plot and characters, but there was an icy current running under her words, and I found myself wanting to plunge into it again and again” (142). The final image, however, completes the circles of the novel and is earth shattering.It is best to read these stories with the expectations of literary fiction embedded within the elements of the weird and the uncanny in order to more fully explore the themes. A dark mediation of the role of the artist and on human powerlessness against a seeming random and yet often very intertwined world. The horror is not one of shock or body horror or even something on cosmic scale.. Indeed many literary characters will feel frustrated with the sometimes obvious and blatant overlaying as not adding to a coherent picture, but that is part of the point of Ogawa’s work: revenge and tragedy, like creation, often does not have a point. It’s horror is in its arbitrary nature as much any cosmic moral statement. These stories still feel very fresh in translation despite their decade-and-a-half of aging in the original language.

good gift

I'm not sure why the English language version of this short-story collection was re-titled REVENGE. None of the stories have anything to do with that which is best served cold. The Japanese title is KAMOKU NA SHIGAI, MIDARA NA TOMURAI, which roughly translated means "A Quiet Corpse, An Erotic Funeral", which is a much better description of this exquisitely creepy collection of moody and dark, interconnected little stories. Yoko Ogawa can do in 11 pages what Stephen King does in 50 - make that intermittent tapping noise in the next room unbearably unnerving and that rustling sound outside uncomfortably worrisome. I put this book down several times and walked around the house checking the doors and windows. The stories are scary because they are an exploration of those little moments that happen in the middle of a boring, tedious day when suddenly you realize that the world you thought you inhabited is multilayered and nuanced and there are hidden little reality traps that we occasionally fall through and suddenly we are face-to-face with something wormy and earthy and ancient and mad. Ogawa's horror comes from the everyday. Her horror is something that can be glimpsed from the corner of your eye, in that dark corner of the garage or at night just outside the window or in the grainy images of an ultrasound or in a fruit orchard in autumn. The reader can smell and hear the horror in her words. The horror is tactile and involves all your senses. The Japanese do horror very well, in their fiction and their movies, but the other emotion at play here and in much of really good Japanese fiction is sorrow. While reading this wonderfully scary and entertaining collection, I was moved to deliberate on the closeness and interconnected nature of those two things. Many of the short stories in REVENGE (God I hate that title) occur over the course of several hours and the actions of the characters happen quickly but the overall narrative is slow and methodical, almost languid and the reader catches glimpses of lost loves and dead children and the consequences of mistakes made. The tension builds gradually and inevitably and inexorably our worst fears are realized. That's horror and the sorrow that sometimes precedes it but almost always accompanies it. The stories are interconnected, but each stands alone as its own work and sometimes the effort to tie two stories together seems forced and unnecessary. This is a great introduction to the wonderful genre of popular female Japanese fiction authors for anyone that hasn't yet read anything by Banana Yoshimoto or Ryu Murakami or Natsuo Kirino. This is a quick and satisfying read - just don't do it late at night.

Yoko Ogawa is one of Japan’s most read contemporary novelists and is the author of The Memory Police, a lyrical dystopia which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Since 1988 she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, and has won every major Japanese literary award.Revenge is a collection of connected short stories subtitled ‘Eleven Dark Tales’. Each story is its own little character portrait introducing either the theme or character of the next, creating a connective tissue which keeps you moving from story to story.Yoko Ogawa weaves a dark and beautiful narrative that pulls together a seemingly disconnected cast of characters – doctors, hairdressers, elderly men and women, torturers, lovers, adulterers, the jilted, the lost and a Bengal tiger.‘The desires of the human heart know no reason or rules’, she says.We meet a woman buying a birthday cake for a long-dead child, a nightclub singer with her living heart on the outside of her body, a room full to the brim of kiwi fruit, dead hamsters and fake novelists.Yoko Ogawa has an anatomist’s skill of showing such beauty in ugliness that you cannot help but be drawn to it, like blood spatter on snow. Her writing style has a brittle grace, beautifully translated by her long-time collaborator Stephen Snyder.In an interview, Yoko Ogawa said, ‘Stories are necessary for us to be able to come to terms with our fears and sorrows, and the one question that cannot be answered logically. That is, all lives end in death. And finding something in nothing, which is essentially what telling a story is, is the only way to understand the existence of death’.I once read an article about the cherry blossom season in Japan and almost untranslatable phrase 'mono no aware' which refers to the bittersweet realisation of the ephemeral nature of all things. It is the awareness that everything is temporary, that youth, romance, love should be cherished because they do not last. Their brevity and impermanence is their beauty, like a short story.I heartily recommend spending an afternoon in the company of Yoko Ogawa. ‘Sometimes, I imagine,’ she writes, ‘in an unknown town far away, in a therapy or hospital room, someone in a broken, hopeless state, is verbalising the maze he or she has wandered into. Sitting alone in the dark, not knowing their words even mean anything, they just talk.I’m sitting in the corner of that dark room, writing everything down. In order to explain that the story they need to help their lost soul exists in the world, I’m jotting everything down, one letter at a time.That’s what my novels are…’

This quickly became one of my favourite novels ever. First and foremost, Ogawa's prose is so elegant and succinct. The book is simply a joy to read. I actually re-read it again immediately after finishing it since I was so addicted to her style. That was a first for me!The stories themselves are mesmerising. They are all terribly sad tales, and rather than going for "straight up horror", Ogawa blends the frightening things that lurk in everyday people's minds with traditional scares. Each of them connect to each other directly or indirectly, sometimes it's obvious, but sometimes it's so subtle that you'll only realise if you're paying attention. In this way, it's very satisfying to "connect the dots", so to speak. In a highly unusual turn for a novel with multiple narrators across different stories, none of the characters have names! Despite this, the story still draws you in and stays with you. In fact, it made it even better for me since it prevents you from "connecting" with the characters in a way. The atmosphere is so, so unique.I really felt compelled to write this review since I think this is a criminally underappreciated book. The Diving Pool, a collection of three novellas by Ogawa, is another good choice after picking this one up.

I went into this not knowing what to expect, having never read Ogawa before, but after the first two stories I could tell I was in for a treat. She has that wonderful habit of making even the mundane seem fascinating and invested with meaning, and a talent for choosing the exact right moment to inject a strange or dreadful detail into a story.These stories all interlink in some way, and the further in you go, the more uncanny the connections begin to feel, like distant memories that are almost fading, but not quite. It’s a really interesting extra layer to an already very good collection of stories. I’d definitely recommend this.

I’ve just recently gotten back into reading after years of neglect and this was a read like no other. I am one to lose attention very quickly but this book gripped mine from start to finish. It’s so beautifully written and it’s received rave reviews from fellow friends whom I’ve recommended this book to. Highly recommend you buy this book. It’s a short read but worth it.

I loved this book. It is one of the best short story collections I have read. They are all connected in some way and are so vivid. I will read more by this author. I am going to try to read more Japanese authors, there are quite a few in translation now. A wonderful collection.