Using economical and precise language, Ogawa conveys intensity of emotion. (...) Ogawa's landscapes are frequently bizarre and contain startling images" - Lucy Popescu, Times Literary Supplement She smiled faintly, in a way that seemed perfectly suited to the quiet of the bakery. I found myself wondering whether she understood that my son had died. Or perhaps she knew only too well about people dying. 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? I would unearth memories, beginning in childhood, of places and occasions when someone had hurt me. In that way, I believed, I would see that my pain was due not only to my husband but to the cruelty of countless others besides. I found it somehow comforting to think that his coldness was in no way special or unique." 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.]

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

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

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The bag-maker’s craftsmanship finds the ultimate test in a young woman who asks him to make something with which to hold her beating heart. Because of an apparent birth defect, it rests outside her chest, exposed and “cowering in fear, the blood vessels trembling with each contraction.” Almost instantly, the bag-maker becomes obsessed with the bag his client has commissioned, and, as he grows more and more engrossed in his work, gradually, with the client herself. Doom hangs over the entire project, but the final outcome of the bag-maker’s work remains hidden until a casual conversation in the next story.

REVENGE | Kirkus Reviews

A woman moves into an apartment next to a large kiwi orchard. She lives across the courtyard from her elderly landlady, Mrs. J, who owns the orchard and cultivates a large garden in the complex and distributes produce to her favorite tenants. The narrator finds herself watching Mrs. J often, becoming familiar with her daily routine. After the narrator tells Mrs. J that the best way to keep the cats away from her produce beds is to spread pine needles around them, Mrs. J brings her fresh produce and comes over for tea frequently, often remarking that the narrator seems tense and that she would gladly offer her a massage for free. When the narrator asks Mrs. J where her husband is, Mrs. J states that he was a drunk who gambled away all the money she made from rent and didn't work and that one night he disappeared, presumably falling drunkenly into the sea. One night, as the narrator is up late working on a manuscript, she sees Mrs. J on top of a middle aged man on her bed. She remarks that it appears Mrs. J is strangling him, though she is just giving him a massage. Another night, she sees Mrs. J running across the kiwi orchard, carrying a large box entirely full of kiwis away at a full sprint. Soon afterwards, Mrs. J begins to dig up carrots that look like pudgy human hands. She gives the first to the narrator, but as they become more plentiful, begins to distribute them amongst her tenants. This brings the attention to the local press, and Mrs. J is photographed with the narrator and a few other tenants holding the oddly shaped carrots. After what seems like some time, the narrator is interviewed by the police, who ask her if she knew what had happened to Mrs. J's husband, or if she had seen anything strange. The narrator repeats what her landlady told her about her husband and tells them about the incident with the kiwis. The police search an abandoned post office nearby and find a large number of kiwis and the corpse of a cat, but nothing else. It's only when they bulldoze the garden that they find the body of Mrs. J's husband, whose hands are 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 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 The US edition of Revenge is billed as Eleven Dark Tales, but the eleven episodes are connected, a detail from one appearing in the next -- and then eventually more, as the sequence not only comes full-circle but turns out to be self-contained, making it ultimately more novel-like than just a collection of short stories. Transit" (Toranjitto, トランジット, 1996); translated by Alisa Freedman, Japanese Art: The Scholarship and Legacy of Chino Kaori, special issue of Review of Japanese Culture and Society, Vol. XV (Center for Inter-Cultural Studies and Education, Josai University, December 2003): 114-125. ISSN 0913-4700

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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." But what a strange shape,” I said, pausing over the potatoes. It was indeed odd: a carrot in the shape of a hand. The 2020 International Booker Prize | The Booker Prizes". thebookerprizes.com . Retrieved 2022-02-09. The reason she was crying didn’t matter to me. Perhaps there was no reason at all. Her tears had that sort of purity."

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

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.” (1-2) Ultimately beautifully brought full circle, Revenge is about as elegant as horror gets, in both style and presentation. 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. If an enterprising reader were to map the through-lines linking the quiet, twisted (and subtly interconnected) tales of eccentric strangers and mysterious deaths in Yoko Ogawa’s new collection, Revenge, the resulting diagram would likely look something like a spider-web: Delicate, spindled, and perfectly designed for entrapment. The experience of reading Revenge is like getting caught in a beautiful, lethal web—or maybe, like wandering through a labyrinthine haunted mansion. These stories’ charm lies in their treacherous unpredictability. In each tale, it’s impossible to anticipate just what particular nightmarish turn the plot will take, or to guess what shadowy character or tiny detail from an entirely separate tale will reappear (a dead hamster left in a trashcan, a brace designed to make the wearer taller, a three-digit number used in a report). There is a spooky fun-house quality to this collection. There was no sign of anyone in the shop, and after waiting a little while longer I considered giving up and leaving. But I had only recently moved to this town and I did not know of another good bakery. Perhaps the fact that they could keep customers waiting like this was a sign of confidence, rather than rudeness. The light in the glass display case was pleasant and soft, the pastries looked beautiful, and the stool was quite comfortable—I liked the place, in spite of the service.

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As one character admits: "Everyone I know has died", and death does come to seem unsettlingly commonplace here -- even as it still comes as a surprise how and when it pops up in some of these tales. As for “Sewing for the Heart”, well many a true word is spoken in jest! What a cliché but how appropriate here. And as for the poor hamster; well that was sad.

Revenge by Yōko Ogawa | Goodreads Revenge by Yōko Ogawa | Goodreads

Feng, Rhoda (Student, Wellesley College). " Review: Yoko Ogawa's Revenge." Huffington Post. May 7, 2013. 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. After he was gone, I began to collect newspaper clippings about children who had died under tragic circumstances. Each day I would go to the library and gather articles from every newspaper and magazine, and then make copies of them.Book Genre: Asia, Asian Literature, Contemporary, Cultural, Fiction, Horror, Japan, Japanese Literature, Literary Fiction, Literature, Mystery, Short Stories 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. But whether accidental, incidental, or simple murder, most of these tales turn out to revolve around death. At this late stage in Revenge, Ogawa has moved horror directly into a home. The characters do not have to break into an abandoned post office or dig in a garden to find the macabre. It is on display in plain sight, used just as a table or a chair or a record player.