A narrator of unknown gender (though it is heavily implied that they are female) visits a bakery on their son's birthday. Nothing appeared to have changed, except that the shadow of the clock tower had grown longer and thinner.

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

Magnificently macabre… Ogawa is the Japanese master of dread… These tales are not for the faint of heart, but Ms. Even the collection’s one tale of relatively conventional romantic revenge plays out unexpectedly; in “Lab Coats,” Ogawa makes the spurned lover an employee in the sterile, rational confines of a hospital and taps an unsuspecting (and slightly enamored) colleague of the murderer to be the story’s narrator.Although it can get frustrating for people to have just the minimal amount of information in any tale, the author spun her own magic within her book, making the storytelling so rich and so detailed that you find yourself constantly mesmerized. It's a language that doesn't announce its own frugality and refuses to make a minimalist's daring and obvious cuts. Ultimately beautifully brought full circle, Revenge is about as elegant as horror gets, in both style and presentation. Before she can follow-through on her crime of passion, though, the surgeon will cross paths with another remarkable woman, a cabaret singer whose heart beats delicately outside of her body.

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

Cakes, pies, and chocolates were carefully arranged in a glass case, and tins of cookies lined shelves on either side. Revenge is only 160 pages in length and a series of interlocking vignettes rather than a full length mystery. Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award including the Akutagawa and the Tanizaki Prizes. Over the course of the conversation, the woman completely abandons the task and focuses solely on what happened when her boyfriend came over, late, and told her that he felt an invisible force was holding him back from telling them and he hadn't even made it there.

Instead Ogawa creates a disturbing, interconnected world where succeeding stories often show, just like a detective story, the events of the past in a new light. 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. Following the stories of seemingly unrelated people and the gruesome events that tie them all together, it would seem as if this is the type of story that leaves you wide awake in the middle of the night. This touching story is centered around two things I thoroughly enjoy- baseball and a boy who loves both the sport and math.