Revenge - Yoko Ogawa

Book review.

Source; Library find.

Short description;   Sophisticated literary horror.

Revenge  is a  collection of eleven interconnected short  stories. Each one of them gives you this sensation of walking through a seemingly safe setting but you are on edge all the same, because the scene is off, it feels like a trap.  And this happens right off the bat. In  'Afternoon at the Bakery,' a woman is looking for strawberry shortbreads.  She enters a bakery but the place is empty, and she  patiently waits to be served, for as long as it takes. In the meantime,  an old woman comes in and makes conversation with her. The protagonist   reveals why she wants the baked goods.

"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."

So far, the scene has been plain. Outside it's a sunny uneventful day. Inside, there  is  polite  gentle woman, carrying out the grim task of buying treats for a dead little boy. And she remains calm throughout.

Yoko Ogawa's Gothic  imagery  is  unsettling because you don't quite know when the illusion of comfort and familiarity will be broken. When I was reading the book, I imagined it all happening in Japan, but that is just an assumption based on the fact that the author is Japanese. The stories themselves do not  hint at any specific place. This could happen in Japan, yes, but if anyone said this is actually taking place in Canada, that could also work. The setting is nondescript enough to be replicated elsewhere.

The narrator changes on each story, and just like the setting, the first-person account is just as fluid. Sometimes it takes a while to work out the gender or the age of the narrator, it is as though this could be anyone. A ghost, a shadow.  Ogawa gives us eeriness without relying too much on the supernatural, except at the end, perhaps.

The writing is stylish, subdued, controlled, even a bit repressed, which matches the characters' emotional repression and silent inner turmoil. An elegant offering, and a postmodern Gothic masterpiece.