Revenge - Eleven Dark Tales is a collection of interwoven stories from Yoko Ogawa, author of The Housekeeper and the Professor. Beginning with slightly strange and moving towards the horror side of creepy, each tale contains a character who continues into the next story, and the delight of the reader is finding the connection.
A mother buys a cake for her dead son. A man accompanies a woman to dinner with her father. A landlady grows strange hand-shaped vegetables in her garden. A man is stuck on a train on the way to a funeral. Two hospital workers find odd items in the laundry. A seamstress is asked to make a bag for a heart. A woman wanders into a Museum of Torture. A man tends to his dying tiger. A writer meets a ghostly woman at a hotel. A woman mentors a music student.
These well-written stories engage the reader, inviting them along for the ride. It is not always clear the sex of the protagonist, and there is curiosity how they fit into the last story. Not as dark or gothic as I expected, but we are in Murakami territory, right around the corner from Shirley Jackson's house - fitting as Ogawa has been awarded the Shirley Jackson Award.
Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award, including the Akutagawa Prize and the Yomiyuri Prize, along with the American Book Award. Her novel The Memory Police was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and National Book Award in 2020.
Her theme is often memory, illustrated so well in her novel The Housekeeper and the Professor, about a young mother and son befriending a mathematics professor with short-term memory, one of my favourite novels.
1998 (translated 2013) / Tradeback / 166 pages
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