Revenge

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I also cannot forget the story or stop thinking about it. If I had the power to give awards to the author, I’d hand her all awards known to man for this masterpiece. And I won’t even hesitate in crowning her one of the best authors I have had the pleasure of learning from. 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 Sinister forces draw together a cast of desperate characters in this eerie and absorbing novel from Yoko Ogawa. My longer review, which was posted at the California Literary Review http://calitreview.com/35422, is included below. 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."

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

Frequently, she explores the theme of memory in her works. For instance, The Housekeeper and the Professor follows a mathematics professor who cannot remember anything for longer than eighty minutes, and The Memory Police is about a group of islanders who gradually forget the existence of certain things, such as birds or flowers. [4] Human cruelty features as another prominent theme in her work, as she is interested in exploring what drives people to commit acts of physical or emotional violence. [4] She often writes about female bodies and the woman's role in a family, which has led many to label her as a feminist writer. Ogawa is hesitatant about this label, stating instead that she "just peeked into [the world of her characters] and took notes from what they were doing". [4] Death, murder, suspicion, blood, mystery, poignancy, libraries, etc. flow throughout these remarkable stories, and I think they’re brilliant. 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. Kaien literary Prize ( Benesse) for her debut The Breaking of the Butterfly (Agehacho ga kowareru toki, 揚羽蝶が壊れる時) A storehouse of creepy and vicious behavior… [Ogawa's] touches of horror sometimes put me in mind of the grown-up stories of Roald Dahl.” — Jim Higgins, The Milwaukee Journal SentinelHave you ever read a story and realized that it has the power to completely restructure your thoughts? Magnificently macabre… Ogawa is the Japanese master of dread… These tales are not for the faint of heart, but Ms. Ogawa is more "Masque of the Red Death" than she is The Ring. She elevates herself above any limitations of the genre she's working in.” — The New York Observer The reason she was crying didn’t matter to me. Perhaps there was no reason at all. Her tears had that sort of purity." You could gaze at this perfect picture all day—an afternoon bathed in light and comfort—and perhaps never notice a single detail out of place, or missing. Hübsches Grauen, höflicher Bericht von Absonderlichem. Hinter solchen Bemerkungen verbirgt sich das Porträt der Autorin. Von allen Zutaten, aus denen sie ihre Geschichten mixt, nimmt sie nie zu viel. Zwischen den knapp und direkt formulierten Ereignissen bleiben Leerräume, durch die der kühlende Wind der Erzählung weht." - Leopold Federmair, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Revenge by Yoko Ogawa - BookBrowse Summary and reviews of Revenge by Yoko Ogawa - BookBrowse

It was a fancy room for a rich man, the kind of place I’d like to live in myself. But there was one strange thing about it: every bare space was covered with some devise for torture. 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. Using spare strokes and macabre detail, Ogawa creates an intense vision of limited lives and the twisted ingenuity of people trapped within them.” — Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air Ultimately beautifully brought full circle, Revenge is about as elegant as horror gets, in both style and presentation. 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

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An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Elsewhere, an accomplished surgeon is approached by a cabaret singer, whose beautiful appearance belies the grotesque condition of her heart. And while the surgeon's jealous lover vows to kill him, a violent envy also stirs in the soul of a lonely craftsman. Desire meets with impulse and erupts, attracting the attention of the surgeon's neighbor---who is drawn to a decaying residence that is now home to instruments of human torture. Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders---their fates converge in an ominous and darkly beautiful web.

REVENGE | Kirkus Reviews

In addition, the deaths themselves are almost all presented as distant, off-scene, or at some remove -- the murder in the apartment above; a death years earlier resurfacing in one form or another; newspaper or other second-hand reports -- even as their effects (and occasionally physical traces) linger, one way or another. He was an intelligent child. He could read his favorite picture book from beginning to end aloud without making a single mistake. He would use a different voice for each character—the piglet, the prince, the robot, the old man. He was left-handed. He had a broad forehead and a mole on one earlobe. When I was busy making dinner, he would often ask questions I did not know how to answer. Who invented Chinese characters? Why do people grow? What is air? Where do we go when we die? When there are more direct encounters with death, often they're only partial -- in one particularly nicely turned story: "I shake it and out falls a tongue" -- or involve animals. The 2020 International Booker Prize | The Booker Prizes". thebookerprizes.com . Retrieved 2022-02-09.A secret garden of dark, glorious flowers: silky, heartbreakingly beautiful...and poison to their roots.” —Joe Hill, author of Heart-Shaped Box and Horns First, I turned off our refrigerator and emptied it: last night's potato salad, ham, eggs, cabbage, cucumbers, wilted spinach, yogurt, some cans of beer, pork—I pulled everything out and threw it aside. The ketchup spilled, eggs broke, ice cream melted. But the refrigerator was empty now, so I took a deep breath, curled myself into a ball, and slowly worked my way inside.

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

This technique is other-worldly and leads to a narrative style where a sense of dread and unease develops slowly. It has a flaw though. Even as characters and their gender shift, the same fugue voice is moved through. This often makes it hard to tell if the narrator is male or female, old or young, or was a minor character encountered in a prior story. This flattening of the voice, which may be in the original or may be a function of the translation, emphasizes the fugue-state of consciousness and dread. It, however, de-emphasizes the specific feel of each character. Proxies for the writer enter into the story, but it is often hard to extract out the specific voice from the meta-fictive elements and as a result both blend into each other and can be lost in confusion. Still, Ogawa is aware of this flaw and even comments on it through a proxy narrator: “The prose was unremarkable, as were the plot and characters, but there was an icy undercurrent running under her words, and I found myself wanting to plunge into it again and again” (148). Novels that are so highly aware of there artifice are generally take a lighter note. The Japanese title, 寡黙な死骸みだらな弔い, also offers a bit more frisson than the simplistic English one; Google translate suggests as a literal translation: 'Indecent dead quiet funeral', which isn't any more insightful than 'revenge' but certainly is more suggestive of what's on offer here.] 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.Throughout the book, we get introduced to a series of colourful characters; some were selfish, some were cruel, some had an evil hidden side, some had a softness that made your heart ache, and some, especially the ones in the last story, had an ethereal beauty to them, one that had you both startled and, surprisingly satisfied, when you reach the end. Ogawa's fiction reflects like a fun-house mirror, skewing conventional responses….[Like] Haruki Murakami, Ogawa writes stories that float free of any specific culture, anchoring themselves instead in the landscape of the mind.” — The Washington Post Book World Oh, that's too bad," he said. "I was looking forward to seeing him." He sounded genuinely disappointed. Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales ( 寡黙な死骸みだらな弔い, Kamoku na shigai, Midara na tomurai ) is a collection of interconnected short stories by Yōko Ogawa. It was published in Japan in 1998, [1] and in the United States by Picador in 2013. Stephen Snyder translated the book into English. 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.