The thrills are sometimes cheap and the connections between stories membrane thin, but Ogawa makes it count with her precision and dedication to bringing the vision full-circle." - Publishers Weekly Revenge is an exceptionally well-done and well-balanced piece of horror-writing, disarmingly detached -- and all the more unsettling for that. 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. The cakes here are delicious," she said at last. "They use our spices, so you know there's nothing funny in them." Sinister forces collide---and unite a host of desperate characters---in this eerie cycle of interwoven tales from Yoko Ogawa, the critically acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor.

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

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. 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.] Lab Coats” is rather macabre, medical and so I enjoyed this but what a dreadful death is described in it. It’s amazing what you can find in a lab coat, say a tongue for example. How had I not noticed before? I rose slightly from my seat and looked past the counter. A doorway behind the cash register was half open, and I could see into the kitchen. A young woman was standing inside with her face turned away. I was about to call out to her, but I stopped myself. She was talking to someone on the telephone, and she was crying. A secret garden of dark, glorious flowers: silky, heartbreakingly beautiful...and poison to their roots.” —Joe Hill, author of Heart-Shaped Box and Horns

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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 Sentinel 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 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. 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

Revenge Yoko Ogawa | Crime Time Revenge Yoko Ogawa | Crime Time

But whether accidental, incidental, or simple murder, most of these tales turn out to revolve around death. The collection is written in her trademark simple elegance (and translated by the marvellous Stephen Snyder). And it's kinda "Olive Kitteridge-y" in that the stories are all linked to each other, even though they are stories that could stand on their own. All stories are disturbing and strange, and reading them is sort of like watching a thousand dominoes fall, one after the other, one hitting the next, causing an avalanche of weirdness. (A child folded up in a refrigerator, carrots that look like hands, a coat made from a tiger's fur, strawberry shortcake for a dead boy's birthday.) People passed by the shop window—young couples, old men, tourists, a policeman on patrol—but no one seemed interested in the bakery. The woman turned to look out at the square, and ran her fingers through her wavy white hair. Whenever she moved in her seat, she gave off an odd smell; the scent of medicinal herbs and overripe fruit mingled with the vinyl of her apron. It reminded me of when I was a child, and the smell of the little greenhouse in the garden where my father used to raise orchids. I was strictly forbidden to open the door; but once, without permission, I did. The scent of the orchids was not at all disagreeable, and this pleasant association made me like the old woman. Death, murder, suspicion, blood, mystery, poignancy, libraries, etc. flow throughout these remarkable stories, and I think they’re brilliant. An eleven-year-old girl who was raped and buried in a forest. A nine-year-old boy abducted by a deviant and later found in a wine crate with both of his ankles severed. A ten-year-old on a tour of an ironworks who slipped from a catwalk and was instantly dissolved in the smelter. I would read these articles aloud, reciting them like poems.Ogawa is masterful at depicting a seemingly normal scene with a tinge of fear that all may not be as bland and routine as it first appears. She establishes this atmosphere in the opening paragraphs of the first story, “Afternoon at the Bakery”: 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.” I listened to this on audio which was awesome, but I’m looking to get the physical book so I can really take in the different stories I think I'll be going," the old woman said. She stood up, smoothed her apron, and glanced out the window toward the square, as though looking one last time for the return of the bakery shop girl. You're right," she said. "I can guarantee they're good. The best thing in the shop. The base is made with our special vanilla."

Ogawa - Wikipedia Yōko Ogawa - Wikipedia

Mold can be quite beautiful," I told my husband. The spots multiplied, covering the shortcake in delicate blotches of color. The Diving Pool (Daibingu puru, ダイヴィング・プール, 1990; Ninshin karendā, 妊娠カレンダー, 1991; Dormitory, ドミトリイ, 1991); translated by Stephen Snyder, New York: Picador, 2008. ISBN 0-312-42683-6; published on The New York Times in 2006 If not, this book will remind you of that. And if so, what a nightmare you have in store! But in a cool way. Pregnancy Diary" (Ninshin karendā, 妊娠カレンダー, 1991); translated by Stephen Snyder, The New Yorker, 12/2005. Read here Revenge begins and ends in old, discarded refrigerators. The theme of fruit - growing, discarded, consumed and going bad - pervades the text. Characters, bizarre in their motivation and behaviour, appear and dissolve like vapour. Events become self-referential but which text precedes the other is unclear. The atmosphere is spectral but not supernatural.Almost no one is willing to speak out or go against the grain: life -- and death -- continue like always, even if or as they have been shaken to the core of their existence. Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales (Kamoku na shigai, midara na tomurai, 寡黙な死骸みだらな弔い,1998) Translated by Stephen Snyder, Picador, 2013. Translator Stephen Snyder has compared Ogawa’s work to that of Murakami, going so far as to call her “the next Haruki Murakami,” (perhaps in part because of the dream-logic of her plots and the diffidence of her protagonists); some reviewers have cited the influence of Borges and Poe as well. These comparisons are tempting, but there’s something facile about them too. Though there are dark, supernatural elements underfoot in these stories, it does not take long to notice that Ogawa works in a register entirely of her own—and is much more interested in experimenting with form than with paying tribute to any particular style. As she put it one interview: Scott Shane's outstanding work Flee North tells the little-known tale of an unlikely partnership ... 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.