Revenge

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At fifteen, I took an overdose of sleeping pills. I must have had a good reason for wanting to kill myself, but I’ve forgotten what it was. Perhaps I was just fed up with everything. At any rate, I slept for eighteen hours straight, and when I woke up I was completely refreshed. My body felt so empty and purified that I wondered whether I had, in fact, died. But no one in my family even seemed to have noticed I had attempted suicide. 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. If only I had words to describe Revenge. But for the first time in a long, long while, I’ve realized I am speechless . Feng, Rhoda (Student, Wellesley College). " Review: Yoko Ogawa's Revenge." Huffington Post. May 7, 2013. Fruit Juice: A young woman meets her politician father as her mother is dying...a hapless friend tags along (4 stars)

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales - Wikipedia

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 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.Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor convinced me that she is not just a writer but also a complex and subtle intellectual. That there is a plan to Revenge and a key to understanding this plan therefore is therefore certain. Without this key, the work is intriguing but incomplete. In The Housekeeper and the Professor, it was the mathematical Euler’s Theorem. But what such a key could be in Revenge is, at least for the moments, beyond me. 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. My longer review, which was posted at the California Literary Review http://calitreview.com/35422, is included below. 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.

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

Rich, Motoko (2019-08-12). "Yoko Ogawa Conjures Spirits in Hiding: 'I Just Peeked Into Their World and Took Notes' ". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2022-02-09. 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. Everything looked delicious. But I knew before I entered the shop what I would buy: two strawberry shortcakes. That was all.Yoko Ogawa is an absolute master of the Gothic at its most beautiful and dangerous, and Revenge is a collection that deepens and darkens with every story you read." - Peter Straub

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

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. Some of these deaths are entirely everyday, from old age and disease; others, the senseless tragedies that occur everywhere (as is the case with the death of a boy in the opening story). The door that would not open no matter how hard you pushed, no matter how long you pounded on it. The screams no one heard. Darkness, hunger, pain. Slow suffocation" 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.] 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."An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Years later, the writer’s stepson reflects upon his stepmother and the strange stories she used to tell him. Meanwhile, a surgeon’s lover vows to kill him if he does not leave his wife. Before she can follow-through on her crime of passion, though, the surgeon will cross paths with another remarkable woman, a cabaret singer whose heart beats delicately outside of her body. But when the surgeon promises to repair her condition, he sparks the jealousy of another man who would like to preserve the heart in a custom tailored bag. Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders—their fates converge in a darkly beautiful web that they are each powerless to escape. Yo ni mo utsukushī sūgaku nyūmon, 世にも美しい数学入門, 2005 ( An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics) These are] haunted characters who could have walked, quite coolly, out of a Joyce Carol Oates or Koji Suzuki creation…. Not recommended for bedtime reading.” — The Boston Phoenix

Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge - Chautauqua Journal Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge - Chautauqua Journal

Briefly Noted Revenge by Yoko Ogawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder (Picador)." The New Yorker. February 25, 2013. 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.) Although it can get frustrating for people to have just the minimal amount of information in any tale, the author spun her own magic within her book, making the storytelling so rich and so detailed that you find yourself constantly mesmerized. 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.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. The Memory Police (Hisoyaka na kesshō, 密やかな結晶, 1994), translated by Stephen Snyder, Pantheon Books, 2019. Since 1988, Ogawa has published more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction. Much of her work has yet to be translated into English. In 2006, she worked alongside the mathematician Masahiko Fujiwara to co-write "An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics", a dialogue on the extraordinary beauty of numbers. [3]