Revenge, of course, suggests a crime novel, but these are short stories, albeit Dark Tales, as the book’s sub-title has it. Even so, the titles (apart from Welcome to the Museum of Torture, and a later story, Poison Plants) rarely suggest any kind of mayhem. The style too, introvert, precise, without flourish yet highly atmospheric, is almost entirely untypical of our genre. Whilst, just occasionally, there are erotic moments that recall the more obsessive style of some Edogawa Rampo ‘crime’ stories, Ogawa has nothing in common with other Japanese crime writers that I have read including Seicho Matsumoto, or any of the other pitifully few (20 or so authors) whose short stories have been translated in the West. Even Patricia Highsmith or Ruth Rendell, who can be said to operate at the edgier end of the crime spectrum, achieve their ends in a much more dramatic and extrovert manner. Nevertheless, crime readers who enjoy those writers are, I think, those who might respond most positively to this haunting and hallucinatory volume.

Revenge by Yōko Ogawa | Goodreads

The strawberry shortcakes were displayed right on the upper shelf of the pastry case, the most prominent place in the shop. Each was topped with three whole strawberries. They looked perfectly preserved, no sign of mold. The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain" (Yūgure no kyūshoku shitsu to ame no pūru, 夕暮れの給食室と雨のプール, 1991); translated by Stephen Snyder, The New Yorker, 9/2004. Read here Welcome to the Museum of Torture” and all the rest of the short stories are excellent but what is remarkable is that there is a continuous flow from one story to another and that is so skilful in itself. “The Man Who Sold Braces” for example is followed on by “The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger” and they both have the “tiger" as a common denominator. Also the so important final sentence or paragraph to each story that says it all. The door that would not open no matter how hard you pushed, no matter how long you pounded on it. The screams no one heard. Darkness, hunger, pain. Slow suffocation"Japan's best teller of macabre tales… Ogawa is such a master that she pushes the boundaries and suspends the mystery… You never know ‘why,' only that humans are slaves to time, and we keep on with our lives so that someday we might understand.” — The Daily Beast A woman goes into a bakery to buy a strawberry cream tart. The place is immaculate but there is no one serving so she waits. Another customer comes in. The woman tells the new arrival that she is buying her son a treat for his birthday. Every year she buys him his favourite cake; even though he died in an accident when he was six years old.

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales - Wikipedia

Six. He’ll always be six. He’s dead.” This book is a first of its kind for me. It has no character names, no locations, no dates, no times, and no specifics of any kind. It’s one of THE MOST pure forms of storytelling I have ever read. I can sum up my review in just one quote from this very book itself. “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.” There is a coldness in this book. A feeling of detachment towards life that comes with life being a bitch to you, taking away something from you that you couldn’t ever bear to lose. A loss that makes you indifferent to many things that should matter and curious about things that should be morbid. The prose was unremarkable, as were the plot and characters, but there was an icy current under her words, and I found myself wanting to plunge into it again and again. There are many adjectives I would use to describe this novel. Genius is one of them. The connections cunningly woven between characters? Stunning. But the short stories themselves? Underwhelming. As the door closed, all light vanished. I could no longer tell whether my eyes were open or shut, and I realized that it made no difference in here. The walls of the refrigerator were still cool. Where does death come from?Since 1988, Ogawa has published more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction. Much of her work has yet to be translated into English. In 2006, she worked alongside the mathematician Masahiko Fujiwara to co-write "An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics", a dialogue on the extraordinary beauty of numbers. [3] Scott Shane's outstanding work Flee North tells the little-known tale of an unlikely partnership ... 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.