1. Title: Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales
Japanese Title: 寡黙な死骸 みだらな弔い
(Kamoku na shigai, midara no tomurai)
Author: Ogawa Yōko (小川 洋子)
Translator: Stephen Snyder
Publication Year: 2013 (America); 1998 (Japan)
Publisher: Picador
Pages: 162
Ogawa Yōko is a writer of the fantastic who spins softly glittering tales of quiet
desperation. In Japan, she’s known for her magical realism, which is so subtle as to
be almost Todorovian in the uncertainty it generates. Nevertheless, her first novel
to appear in English translation, The Housekeeper and the Professor, is about kind-hearted
people behaving nobly in the face of senescence and overcoming emotional
adversity by opening their hearts to one another. It’s a good book even despite its
clinging miasma of Hallmark-style sentimentality, but the way the novel was
marketed made it feel as if its publisher were trying to pass Ogawa off as the next
Yoshimoto Banana, which she most decidedly is not. Messages of hope and moral
fortitude are few and far between in Ogawa’s work, and her next novel to appear in
translation, Hotel Iris, is about ephebophilia and sadomasochism in a decaying
seaside town. The novel is quite short and, given its subject matter, an odd choice
for translation, but perhaps its publishers saw a faint connection to
Yoshimoto’s Goodbye Tsugumi, which explores similar themes (albeit in an infinitely
more upbeat and chipper manner).
I am therefore interested in the way in which Ogawa’s newest work to appear in
translation, Revenge, is pitched to potential readers. Short blurbs from Junot Díaz
and Hilary Mantel appear on the back cover, but the writer who bears the honor of
having his praise appear right in the middle of the front cover is Joe Hill. Joe Hill is
the author of several novels, comic books, and Kindle singles, and he’s known as a
writer of grisly and violent mystery fiction. Hill’s debut work, 20th Century Ghosts, is a
collection of stories that contain more subtle disquiet than they do splattered blood.
My favorite is “Voluntary Committal,” in which a seriously disturbed man builds an
elaborate crawl-through maze of cardboard boxes in his basement, which
eventually becomes a portal to another dimension. 20th Century Ghosts has won all
sorts of awards, from the Bram Stoker Award to the British Fantasy Award, but Hill

2. is still considered a horror writer; and, by association, Ogawa is positioned as a
horror writer as well. As if Hill’s name alone were not enough to convey the
message, the cover of the North American edition of Revenge is designed to resemble
dead skin stitched with rotting thread.
Despite the implications of its cover, Revenge is less about hideous creepy crawlies
lurking at the foot of cellar stairs than it is about the small disturbances in daily
routine that hint at the madness waiting patiently on the edges of human
civilization. For example, the first story in collection, “Afternoon at the Bakery,”
opens with a scene of a peaceful town on a Sunday afternoon:
Families and tourists strolled through the square, enjoying the weekend. Squeaky sounds could be heard
from a man off the corner, who was twisting balloon animals. A circle of children watched him,
enthralled. Nearby, a woman sat on a bench knitting. Somewhere a horn sounded. A flock of pigeons
burst into the air, and startled a baby who began to cry. The mother hurried overto gatherthe child in
her arms.
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, ormissing.
What you might notice, however, is the author’s focus on children and families. The
detail out of place in this scene is a solitary mother who enters a quiet bakery to
buy strawberry shortcake for her son’s birthday. The catch is that her son is dead
and has been for many years. He died when he was six years old, and his mother
responded to the tragedy by piecing together a scrapbook of newspaper articles
about other children who died in similarly upsetting circumstances, which she
describes in loving detail for the benefit of the reader. The physical deterioration of
the cakes she continues to buy for her son’s birthday serves as an analogy for her
own decaying sanity, something that used to be as fresh and wholesome as a
young boy but now resembles nothing so much as rotting flesh:
Long after I had realized my son would not be coming back, I kept the strawberry shortcake we were
meant to have eaten together. I passed my days watching it rot. First, the cream turned brown and
separated from the fat, straining the cellophane wrapper. Then the strawberries dried out, wrinkling up
like the heads of deformed babies. The sponge cake hardened and crumbled, and finally a layer of mold
appeared.
“Mold can be quite beautiful,” I told my husband. The spots multiplied, covering the shortcake in delicate
splotches of color.

3. “Get rid of it,” my husband said.
I could tell he was angry. But I did not know why he would speak so harshly about ourson’s birthday
cake. So I threw it in his face. Mold and crumbs covered his hair and his cheeks, and a terrible smell
filled the room. It was like breathing in death.
The above passage is the dramatic high point of the story, which is otherwise
sedated and subdued. The horror Ogawa offers her reader is not the terrified panic
of a boy clawing vainly for air as he suffocates in the dark or the emotional turmoil
of a distraught mother sobbing wildly in her grief, but rather the unsettling
certainty that people who are irreparably damaged walk among us within a world
that is constantly growing as filthy and old as we will one day become.
The eleven stories in Revenge are very loosely connected, with each almost fitting
into the next like a section of a puzzle box that has been warped by humidity. The
major theme connecting the stories is ultimate futility of the attempt to outlast the
relentless march of time through creative endeavors or the preservation of a
material legacy, and the collection is filled with unremarkable deaths, lonely rooms
stuffed with junk, and putrefying fruit and vegetables. It’s dark stuff, to be sure,
but Ogawa’s language and narrative skill, rendered beautifully in Stephen Synder’s
translation, allow the reader to experience the horror of the stories in Revenge as so
mundane as to be almost comforting.
NPR listed Snyder’s translation of Revenge as one of the best books released in 2013, and
it’s in good company. Despite Picador’s gruesome cover, Ogawa’s stories have
much more in common with her listmate Karen Russell’s debut collection St. Lucy’s
Home for Girls Raised by Wolves than any of the recent work by Joe Hill or Peter Straub –
or any of the recent work of Murakami Haruki, to whom many reviewers feel
compelled to compare Ogawa for some inexplicable reason. Ogawa has her own
style of haunting and meticulously crafted fiction, and I can only hope that more of
her short stories find their way into English translation, the sooner the better.