Revenge

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After he was gone, I began to collect newspaper clippings about children who had died under tragic circumstances. Each day I would go to the library and gather articles from every newspaper and magazine, and then make copies of them. If creepy were a place, Ms. Ogawa has come up with many ways to get there… Even while punctuated [by] macabre flourishes her book maintains its restraint, like a dark alley that's too quiet, or an insane person acting too calm.” —Susannah Meadows , The New York Times The reason she was crying didn't matter to me. Perhaps there was no reason at all. Her tears had that sort of purity.

Revenge (Vintage Editions) eBook : Ogawa, Yoko, Snyder Revenge (Vintage Editions) eBook : Ogawa, Yoko, Snyder

Revenge is an exceptionally well-done and well-balanced piece of horror-writing, disarmingly detached -- and all the more unsettling for that. 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:

Yet even when they snap -- the woman in the first story, trying to go to her son; the murderers -- the narratives, and the lives of the narrators, continue as coolly as always. But what a strange shape,” I said, pausing over the potatoes. It was indeed odd: a carrot in the shape of a hand. I repeated to myself what I would say when she emerged into the fading light of the shop: "Two strawberry shortcakes, please." As in Ogawa’s other writing, such as The Diving Pool, food becomes a focus for displaced love, but holds within it not a substitute for human affection and closeness, but excess without the possibility of satiety. In “Fruit Juice,” the narrator is invited by a classmate to have dinner in a French restaurant with her and her father, whom she has never met before. After the dinner, the two classmates come across an abandoned post office. They break in to find it filled with kiwis: The girl in the kitchen replaced the receiver. I held my breath. She looked down at the phone for a moment, then she heaved a deep sigh and dabbed at her tears with the napkin.

Yoko Ogawa’s “Revenge” - Words Without Borders Yoko Ogawa’s “Revenge” - Words Without Borders

You may be thinking that a bag is just a thing in which to put other things. And you’re right, of course. But that’s what makes them so extraordinary. A bag has no intentions or desires of its own, it embraces every object that we ask it to hold. You trust the bag, and it, in return, trusts you. To me, a bag is patience; a bag is profound discretion."Book Genre: Asia, Asian Literature, Contemporary, Cultural, Fiction, Horror, Japan, Japanese Literature, Literary Fiction, Literature, Mystery, Short Stories

Revenge by Yōko Ogawa | Goodreads

Kaien literary Prize ( Benesse) for her debut The Breaking of the Butterfly (Agehacho ga kowareru toki, 揚羽蝶が壊れる時) Afternoon at the Bakery, the first story, sets the tone. ‘It was a beautiful Sunday. The sky was a cloudless dome of sunlight’. The first person narrator, gender at first unrevealed, visits a bakery to buy two strawberry shortcakes. The shop is empty, no one at the counter, the potential customer decides to wait. Joined by ‘a short, plump woman’ also waiting, they converse. “Whenever she moved in her seat, she gave off an odd smell…” that reminds the narrator of a childhood scene. The cakes are for a son. “He’s six” confides the narrator suddenly, “He’ll always be six. He’s dead.” The Housekeeper and the Professor (Hakase no ai shita sūshiki, 博士の愛した数式, 2003); translated by Stephen Snyder, New York: Picador, 2008. ISBN 0-312-42780-8Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlist for Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales (Japanese; trans. Stephen Snyder) [9] Revenge] Erupts into the ordinary world as if from the unconscious or the grave…. A haunting introduction to her work… the overall effect is [that of] David Lynch: the rot that lurks beneath the surface.” — The Economist A woman moves into an apartment next to a large kiwi orchard. She lives across the courtyard from her elderly landlady, Mrs. J, who owns the orchard and cultivates a large garden in the complex and distributes produce to her favorite tenants. The narrator finds herself watching Mrs. J often, becoming familiar with her daily routine. After the narrator tells Mrs. J that the best way to keep the cats away from her produce beds is to spread pine needles around them, Mrs. J brings her fresh produce and comes over for tea frequently, often remarking that the narrator seems tense and that she would gladly offer her a massage for free. When the narrator asks Mrs. J where her husband is, Mrs. J states that he was a drunk who gambled away all the money she made from rent and didn't work and that one night he disappeared, presumably falling drunkenly into the sea. One night, as the narrator is up late working on a manuscript, she sees Mrs. J on top of a middle aged man on her bed. She remarks that it appears Mrs. J is strangling him, though she is just giving him a massage. Another night, she sees Mrs. J running across the kiwi orchard, carrying a large box entirely full of kiwis away at a full sprint. Soon afterwards, Mrs. J begins to dig up carrots that look like pudgy human hands. She gives the first to the narrator, but as they become more plentiful, begins to distribute them amongst her tenants. This brings the attention to the local press, and Mrs. J is photographed with the narrator and a few other tenants holding the oddly shaped carrots. After what seems like some time, the narrator is interviewed by the police, who ask her if she knew what had happened to Mrs. J's husband, or if she had seen anything strange. The narrator repeats what her landlady told her about her husband and tells them about the incident with the kiwis. The police search an abandoned post office nearby and find a large number of kiwis and the corpse of a cat, but nothing else. It's only when they bulldoze the garden that they find the body of Mrs. J's husband, whose hands are missing. Reading Yoko Ogawa is akin to watching a film by David Lynch; the experience is an admixture of vertiginous revelation and dark defamiliarization… her stories seem to exist in a timeless, fluid medium all its own.” — The Huffington Post

Revenge - Penguin Books UK

It's not just Murakami but also the shadow of Borges that hovers over this mesmerizing book… [and] one may detect a slight bow to the American macabre of E.A. Poe. Ogawa stands on the shoulders of giants, as another saying goes. But this collection may linger in your mind — it does in mine — as a delicious, perplexing, absorbing and somehow singular experience." —Alan Cheuse, NPR He died twelve years ago. Suffocated in an abandoned refrigerator left in a vacant lot. When I first saw him, I didn't think he was dead. I thought he was just ashamed to look me in the eye because he had stayed away from home for three days. a b "Writer Ogawa Yōko's Stories of Memory and Loss". nippon.com. 2020-03-27 . Retrieved 2022-02-09.

Excuse me," I called hesitantly. There was no reply, so I decided to sit down on a stool in the corner and wait.