Every once in a while you come across a book that just blows your mind away. ‘Revenge’, a collection of 11 short stories, by Yoko Ogawa is one such volume. Ogawa has you trapped in her web of dark tales and you wish to relive the experience over and over again. You enter Ogawa’s dark and delicious world with a woman going into a local bakery to buy strawberry shortcake for her son. In the course of the conversation, she tells another woman she has only just met at the otherwise empty bakery that “today is his birthday.” When asked how old he is, the woman replies, “Six. He’ll always be six. He’s dead,” before going on to explain the bizarre events following his death.
All the stories in this collection begin innocuously enough. Two girls work in the laundry at a hospital washing lab coats. A man on the way to his stepmother’s funeral is waylaid when his train gets stuck in the snow. Each premise is ordinary but as the stories progress they take horrifying turns. They are all about death, abruptly ending relationships, and, of course, about revenge. Individually, the stories don’t add up to much. If you choose a random story and read that, you are likely to be disappointed. But it’s a powerful, albeit at times jarring, anthology when you read the stories consecutively from beginning to end. There are some stories like “Old Mrs. J” and “Lab Coats” that can be read as self-contained pieces but most stories have a link to the next in the anthology.
The charm of the stories, however, lies in how unpredictable they are. It’s spooky and fun at the same time. You get goose bumps when you suddenly realize what has just happened. And the blows are always sucker punch—you never see them coming. Translator Stephen Snyder compared Ogawa’s work to Murakami’s, going as far as to call her “the next Haruki Murakami” and some reviewers have even cited the influence of Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges. Deftly constructed and skillfully written, Ogawa’s stories will leave you feeling a bit unsettled but also wanting to read everything else she has ever written.
Book: Revenge
Genre: Fiction
Author: Yoko Ogawa
Published: January 29, 2013
Publisher: Picador
Language: Translated in English by Stephen Snyder
Pages: 176, Paperback
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About the author
Yoko Ogawa has published over 20 books, short story collections, novels, and works of non-fiction. She has won five prestigious literary awards in Japan. In 2008, she was awarded the Shirley Jackson Award for “The Diving Pool”. Four of her books have been translated into English. |
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