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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. Yoko Ogawa's Revenge is a master class in the macabre that will haunt you to the very end.… (more)
User reviews
The stories are all connected: with the one before it, the one after it, the one at the end with the one at the beginning until you finally have so many connections your head is swimming. Her brilliance cannot be denied. The prose is spare and evocative. And when you get to the end you realize that she crafted a unique puzzle.
The stories are peopled by seemingly normal characters: a bakery worker, a hospital secretary, a respiratory doctor, an author. But at some point, for varied reasons, they all come unhinged, in one way or another. In many cases, the ordinariness of life itself, grates on the individual with its loneliness, monotony, sadness and loss and finally pushes the character to the edge of insanity where it sits, waiting to go over the brink.
In one story, Sewing for the Heart, a woman whose heart is outside of her body commissions a bag maker to make a bag that will neatly hold the heart in place. When he goes to deliver it to her, she informs him that she no longer needs it, because the surgery to fix her problem has finally been perfected. I’ll spare you the gruesome details of his response. In a later story, the very bag shows up in the story entitled Welcome to the Museum of Torture. You’ve probably never been to a museum like this where various methods of torture reside. For instance, there’s a funnel that is used to drip cold water on the victim’s face:
”For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls , drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they literally explode, and every sensation in the body is absorbed into that one spot on the forehead---indeed, you come to feel that you are nothing but a forehead, into which a fine needle is being forced millimeter by millimeter. You can’t sleep or even speak, hypnotized by a suffering that is greater than any mere pain. In general, the victim goes mad before a day has passed.” (Page 94)
Grim and unsettling. Brilliant and poignant. Elegantly written yet with tremendous emotional impact.
What is also striking about these stories is that each one seems to open rather benignly, inviting you in. Little by little you start to get used to the environment and maybe for a little while feel comfy where you are. The first story, "Afternoon at the Bakery," for example, begins with a look at a nearly picture perfect scene of families strolling through a square during "an afternoon bathed in light and comfort," kids watching a balloon man ply his trade and a woman knitting on a bench. From there the action shifts to a bakery, where "everything looked delicious," with the "sweet scent of vanilla" hanging in the air. Once you've grown accustomed to your surroundings, however, you realize that something is just a bit off-kilter. The first hint comes when there's no one at the counter to help the customer/narrator who comes in, even though the friendly woman smelling of "overripe fruit" who pops in shortly afterward assures the customer that she's sure the girl will be right back. As the two women start making small talk it turns out that the customer is there to buy her son strawberry shortcake for his birthday:
"I'm buying them for my son. Today is his birthday."
"Really? Well, I hope it's a happy one. How old is he?"
"Six. He'll always be six. He's dead."
Yikes. Not only is the boy dead, but he had died twelve years earlier, suffocating in an abandoned refrigerator. Even stranger is what the second woman says to the boy's mother:
"Well,...then it was lucky you chose this bakery. There are no better pastries anywhere; your son will be pleased. And they include a whole box of birthday candles for free. They're darling -- red, blue pink, yellow, some with flowers or butterflies, animals, anything you could want."
The story continues to darken and to take strange turns with the mother's memories of the day her son died and how she suffered in the aftermath; and by now you have been jolted out of the comfort of the warm, cozy, vanilla-scented bakery and thrust into a strange and growing darkness. Even the scene in the square takes on a surreal tone as the clock strikes five. People gather to watch the little automata come out of the clock door, but what emerges is not what you'd expect: instead it's a parade of a chicken, some soldiers, and a skeleton, followed by an angel who is "beating her golden wings."
I'm not going to go into the other ten stories but the point is that each starts out so normally that you truly can't even begin to imagine what is waiting in store for you as you turn each page. As you read, as each story unfolds, the connections that are found in each and every story only heighten the strangeness -- until the last story brings about quite possibly the strangest tie of all, reminding you that there is no end to it all. Suffering and pain, death and loss are all connected here in this fictional world, just as they are in the real one, but here the author makes the links painfully clear where that's not always possible in reality. She does it in such a way that seemingly normal situations head down a path where these connections all resonate within a bizarre, claustrophobic and eerie atmosphere.
I have to say that I have never in my entire life read anything quite like Revenge, and I probably never will again. It is truly a masterpiece of darkness and the best advice I can offer is this: run, do not walk to your nearest bookseller to pick up a copy, or get on your computer and order it online. You definitely do not want to miss this very strange but at the same time magnificent little book.
It appeared in an Easter Basket from my daughter, on a weekend when we visited her to celebrate both my birthday and the Easter holiday. Meanwhile, my wife had been shopping too, and while she didn’t see Revenge at the book store, she did see The Housekeeper and the Professor, a novel by Ogawa, with a significant plug on the back cover from Junot Diaz, a favorite author of mine. So for my birthday I also received this Ogawa book. I read Housekeeper first (reviewed separately by me elsewhere) and was highly impressed with the style, the content, the writing. It is a beautiful novel. I liked it so much I immediately turned to Revenge, the collection of stories; I wanted more!
Boy, was I surprised: as much as I have lauded the novel, the stories are brilliant, and perhaps even better. I say perhaps, because it is not really fair to compare Ogawa’s tales here with her other fiction. This is written with an entirely different structure in a style strikingly at variance from what you encounter in her novel. These stories are not only scary, they are downright creepy. This is the kind of horror at the root of an Edgar Allen Poe tale, or a Stephen King short story that is more about the human condition than about the supernatural, as opposed to the horror residing in Anne Rice, H.P. Lovecraft or the King stuff that features monsters and such. Reading Revenge – which I actually inhaled over a day and a half -- I got that same pit in my stomach feeling of impending creepy terror that I experienced on my first drive-by of Silence of the Lambs. Of course, there are no serial killers here (or are there?). The random elements that link the stories are hard to spot at first – I found myself returning to ones read earlier to more carefully re-read the recurring reference – as the sequence builds the sense of interconnectedness emerges, far more subtly than say, in the movie Crash, but nevertheless there is this sense that we are all (and quite disturbingly the reader gets sucked into it too!) ineluctably wound up in this universe upon which everything is touching upon something else; and it is terrible universe after all.
I highly recommend Revenge. Outstanding on every level. And I can’t wait to read more Ogawa!
This is a must read.
I also
I listened on audio, and their were two narrators--one for the stories with female narrators and one for male. The male narrator was great. The female narrator is quite well known and has one book narration awards, but I found her somewhat odd southern accent to be rather off-putting for a book translated from Japanese that, as far as I can tell, can be assumed to take place in Japan. The male narrator has a standard American accent, so the switching between the two was also quite jarring.
Now to what's really important. Maybe this is due to the translation, but Yoko Ogawa is like an artist who wants to paint with as few brushstrokes as possible. The
On the other hand, Ogawa is so minimalist that despite each story having a different narrator, she does not change the style or tone. This makes it so you cannot always tell who is speaking, and I mean basic info, like male or female, unless something like a boyfriend is mentioned. Perhaps this was intentional, but I'm not sure.
This was a creepy story collection, though. From "Lab Coats" to "The Museum of Torture" I had an especially big case of THE SHIVERS. While it's not out-and-out horror, I wouldn't like to read it in an empty house at night.
I was listening to this on audio and trying to figure out why this collection felt so old school to me and I'm pretty sure Ogawa excluded any mention of modern technologies from the text. If they were mentioned, they were just a blip in passing because I couldn't remember them. And this worked for me A LOT. These stories felt like they could have taken place at any point in the last 70 years. So much of the focus was on human connection and human sensation. And I think it made the unsettling vibes every character was giving off so much more chilling.
The way all of these stories connect is so fucking masterful though and is why this collection is so great though. It really made me want to go all conspiracy theorist with the bulletin board and string to connect all the dots. But it also added so much re-read value to the collection. As you progress through the stories, you learn more about characters you were introduced to earlier on and it makes you want to re-read the earlier stories with this new information. One character in particular, who I only ever remember being called "Mama," appears often and is also sort of meta in that she's a writer who experienced and wrote about one of the stories for other characters in later stories to read about. Ogawa clearly had a lot of fun plotting this out and it is GOOD.
Lastly, the symbolism. I listened to this on audiobook and was so consumed by the stories that I know I didn't pick up on all of the symbolism or meaning in the collection. We get repeated depictions of juicy fruits, decay, food as comfort, torture, aging, and death. But overall I felt this book was a sort of reckoning with aging, loss, and our inevitable deaths. Several times in the story, people lose touch with someone they cared about and receive news that they died all alone and the things they left behind amount to nothing but garbage. The translation of the original Japanese title is "Silent corpse, lewd mourning," which makes way more sense than "Revenge." I suppose there are characters in the collection who technically kill out of revenge, but they don't feel vengeful. They feel like they're losing their minds out of loss.
Biting into fruit is often used as metaphor for the loss of innocence, so watching a strawberry shortcake decay, tomatoes get smashed into pulp on the street, a girl gorge on juicy kiwis as she's wracked with sobs feels symbolic of both growing up and loss. One character even invents a device that aims to help people grow taller but causes so much pain it's akin to torture. Another symbol of growing up and aging. Some people lose and lose and lose and leave nothing behind but a few fond memories. That's what I took away in this read, but I'm excited to give it a closer read in print and see if my thoughts change.
The first couple of stories almost turned me off. There wasn’t much depth to them on their own, but once I got the hang of how the book worked and understood those smaller stories were only bits and pieces of the larger story, the book grew on me. You find all different types of characters: cheating lovers, scorned workers, con-artists, and distant relatives; all plotting some type of revenge on those that had wronged them.
The book can be slow at times. You have to read through a story that seems pointless at first, but fits in perfectly when you read all the stories together. Some of the characters are a little bland, but others pop out and you want to know more of their story.
Overall, I had mixed feelings about Revenge. The way the stories slotted into place to make the big picture was creative and intriguing, but it was also a bit boring because they’re so disjointed on their own. It’s still a good read, but in order to give it a chance, you have to read the first 3-4 stories to start seeing how it works.