The real horror isn’t the death, but the drugged blindness of the narrator’s infatuation on the murderer—a fixation intense enough to anesthetize an appropriate moral or emotional response.

Revenge - Penguin Books UK

Whenever she moved in her seat, she gave off an odd smell…” that reminds the narrator of a childhood scene. Arresting images abound: a mountain of kiwis in an old post office, hand-shaped carrots, a Bengal tiger, a protective pouch for a still-beating heart, not to mention various torture devices collected in a museum (all genuine -- meaning they're certain they were: "actually used to torture someone", rather than just for decoration . When a story has the ability to make you ponder, it’s a given fact that it has the ability to encourage sentiment in the harshest of souls. Each morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are reintroduced to one another, a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms between them. 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.It’s amazing how one by one the author connects all the short stories, weaving them into one beautiful piece that comes together to form a hauntingly perfect picture. 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. Even if they are haunting and strange, these stories didn't have the impact for me that I experienced in her longer fiction.

The Housekeeper and the Professor - Penguin Books UK

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. As the perspective and point of view change from story to story, the reader feels ground shifting constantly. The Memory Police (Hisoyaka na kesshō, 密やかな結晶, 1994), translated by Stephen Snyder, Pantheon Books, 2019.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. That there is a plan to Revenge and a key to understanding this plan therefore is therefore certain. The girl's father offers to give them a ride home, but she refuses, notably also refusing to take the subway back to their neighborhood.

Ogawa - Wikipedia Yōko Ogawa - Wikipedia

while “Poison Plants” finally reveals how the child’s listless body came to be curled in an abandoned refrigerator. When I picked this book, on a random recommendation, no less, I was afraid of what I might be getting into.For Ogawa smells are often crucial, associated with both food or death and decay, (sometimes both simultaneously). 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.

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales - Wikipedia

Each story from the first to the last is linked either by a mysterious happening or, in some cases, what seems like the passing of a baton in a relay, each story ratcheting up the tension, until the last story turns us back to the first in what almost seems like an Escher painting.Yōko Ogawa ( 小川 洋子) was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, and lives in Ashiya. 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. The hill is covered with fruit trees, including kiwis; “The kiwis in particular grew so thick that on moonlit nights when the wind was blowing, the whole hillside would tremble as though covered with a swarm of dark green bats. In the past year reading books by women around the world has been lacking, so I decided to make this year’s lineup more diverse. 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.