Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales (2013) from
the Japanese author Yoko Ogawa loses nothing in the translation.
The collection of short stories begins
gently with Afternoon at the Bakery.
A woman, the narrator, enters a small bakery to buy two strawberry shortcakes – one for her
six year old son for his birthday. He died 12 years ago in a tragic accident.
No one is serving – all is quiet – except for a young woman weeping silently in
the back room as she takes a phone call.
In Fruit
Juice 20 years ago when a young student’s mother is in hospital, she meets
her father for the first time, inviting a fellow student (the narrator) to
accompany her. On the walk home they stop outside a locked building, a former
post office, to rest. Inside are cardboard boxes of kiwi fruit. Six years later
he phones her when he reads that her father has died. In the story, Old Mrs. J, the narrator is a writer in
his new apartment overlooking a hill of fruit trees, including kiwi fruit,
belonging to his landlady. Her husband was found strangled in an old post
office – with part of his body missing.
In Sewing
for the Heart, the narrator is a bag maker, making a special customized bag
for a woman, a singer. When he is finished, she tells him she has no need for
it anymore. In Tomatoes and the Full Moon
the narrator meets a female writer, a small, older lady. She has a book
with her called Afternoon at the Bakery.
In the last story, Poison Plants, the
female narrator, an artist, writes of a young man – sometimes she read his
fortune from tarot cards. He would read to her, from a book in her husband’s
library – he had been dead for 40 years – the book was about a hill planted with kiwi
fruit.
All eleven tales are told in the first
person – but a different person for each tale. Each tale is linked to the one
before, adding a character and another layer of mystery. There are deaths, murders,
and mysteries, for sure. The eleven dark tales are not violent and vicious, but
they are weirdly malicious, as the title Revenge indicates. The writing remains
calm and simple, but in its simplicity is a chilling sense of cruelty. Well
written, and disconcertingly, disturbingly, dark.
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