But she’s spotless.” 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. When the dark deed is revealed, it’s not the murder itself, but the reaction of the killer’s confidante that’s most chilling: “I feel a scream rising out of me but somehow I stop it, hold it back,” the narrator explains, “and instead I calmly imagine the scene: the knife in her pretty hand the blade slicing into him again and again skin ripping, blood spurting.

There is a spooky fun-house quality to this collection.Įven the collection’s one tale of relatively conventional romantic revenge plays out unexpectedly in “Lab Coats,” Ogawa makes the spurned lover an employee in the sterile, rational confines of a hospital and taps an unsuspecting (and slightly enamored) colleague of the murderer to be the story’s narrator. In each tale, it’s impossible to anticipate just what particular nightmarish turn the plot will take, or to guess what shadowy character or tiny detail from an entirely separate tale will reappear (a dead hamster left in a trashcan, a brace designed to make the wearer taller, a three-digit number used in a report). These stories’ charm lies in their treacherous unpredictability. The experience of reading Revenge is like getting caught in a beautiful, lethal web-or maybe, like wandering through a labyrinthine haunted mansion. Ogawa is more 'Masque of the Red Death' than she is The Ring.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. These tales are not for the faint of heart, but Ms.

More disturbing than the bloody imagery is the eerie calm with which each plot unfolds, as if one act of violence must necessarily transform into the portal for another * New Yorker * the overall effect is David Lynch: the rot that lurks beneath the surface * Economist *įittingly, each tale seems to be its own torture chamber-dark and meticulous. Erupts into the ordinary world as if from the unconscious or the grave. She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance. Ogawa is original, elegant, very disturbing - Hilary MantelĪ conspicuously gifted writer.To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state tinged with a nightmare, and her stories continue to haunt.

Revenge book yoko