Yoko Ogawa is a writer with noticeable skill in surprise denouements. Fans of her earlier works—Hotel Iris and The Diving Pool—will be ultimately familiar with the way in which she leaves a reader breathless with the twisted paths her characters take on, only to come to an abrupt, and often unexpected, ending.
Ogawa often delves into the subconscious of her narrators. In The Diving Pool, the inner evils of two main characters surfaced—one with a strange fascination in hearing the cries of her younger siblings, and another who fed her sister a fetus-harming jam for most of her pregnancy. In her work, Ogawa tends to use female narrators who are distanced from those around them, aiding in the sometimes-strange predicaments they get themselves into. By using a character’s secret obsessions, her plots take on a realistic feel in which the reader is merely along for the ride.
In Revenge, Ogawa flexes her storytelling muscle by weaving together a series of tales, each one focusing on a character from the story before it and acting as a set of Russian nesting dolls in her usual world of macabre. Ogawa seems to let her characters—each one vastly different from the last—go on a journey of their own desires or wishes. She takes us through several human hauntings in one short novella: love, sadness, guilt, mourning, obsession, anger. We see a myriad of lifestyles in Revenge that let us know that no one, in Ogawa’s mind, is safe from the vulnerabilities of their desires.
Revenge opens with “Afternoon At The Bakery,” in which a mother visits a shop to buy a birthday cake for her son. When asked how old her son will be, she tells another woman in the shop, “Six. He’ll always be six. He’s dead.” The mother never purchases the cake for her son. Instead, she listens in on a younger girl working in the back who cries as she takes a phone call.
The next story, “Fruit Juice,” is about the bakery worker from the previous story. She goes to dinner with her father, who she’s just met for the first time in high school. To absolve her sadness afterwards, she stumbles upon a post office filled with kiwis and eats until her heart is content. The eerie factor is upped in Ogawa’s use of detail to describe the scene that unfolds, “I could hear her teeth sink into the flesh. For a long time, she stood there eating kiwis, one after another. She consumed them like starving child, dizzy with hunger. Her carefully ironed blouse and her beautiful hands grew sticky.”
The following story, “Old Mrs. J,” follows the path of the mysterious kiwis by closing the scope in on an elderly widow who keeps growing carrots in her garden in the shape of hands. She is arrested at the end of the story for the murder of her husband, who is found buried in her backyard amputated at the wrists.
Each short piece in Revenge delves deeper into the universe that Ogawa has created. Characters deal with predicaments, suffering, loneliness and sometimes, fate. What makes Revenge different from Ogawa’s other works is that she seems to have honed the skill of creating a unique eerie atmosphere within smaller sections; hovering above each story is an air of creepiness that sits with the reader throughout the action that unfolds.
Revenge is Ogawa’s fourth work released in the United States. Despite her stories originating in Japanese, they lose none of her delicate touches with language in translation. She is the winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Shirley Jackson Award for her dark, brilliantly crafted stories. She has often been compared to a fellow Japanese author, Haruki Murakami, so fans of his works, as well as fans of her earlier works, will be delighted with the thread of stories that Ogawa weaves together in Revenge.
Revenge is translated by Stephen Snyder and published by Picador Books.