Yoko Ogawa is a well-established and highly respected author in Japan, who, to quote from

her profile at the start of this taut book of short stories, ‘has won every major Japanese
literary award including the Akutagawa and the Tanizaki prizes’. Ogawa is now in her 50s,
and these stories certainly have the marks of a confident author in free-flow. There is an
undeniable beauty of narrative in each tale and in the discreet connections that bind them
together as a coherent whole.

Ogawa seems to be an author who is more comfortable with the short story and novella
genres that make up the majority of her oeuvre, rather than more extended prose, and this
work, despite containing a total of eleven stories, stands only at a well-spaced 176 pages.
Still, it is hard to complain when the stories are crafted so meticulously, with an economy of
prose that often cuts right to the heart of the matter. On occasion, however, she does have a
tendency to rush ahead with the narrative with such vigour that the dramatic impact is lost,
a build-up of tension impossible.

Rather than a collection of randomly selected short stories, the tales that
comprise Revenge have a broader significance to one another, generating a sense of co-
dependence that gives birth to a narrative greater than the sum of its parts. In a manner
somewhat reminiscent of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, the stories hop through various
times and places, and their connection to each other is not always immediately apparent; the
desire to find out how each story is interlinked generates a pleasant page turning anxiety not
often found in the short story genre.

In ‘Afternoon at the Bakery’ a woman waits for a baker to return so that she can buy a
strawberry shortcake for her six-year-old son, who died twelve years ago inside a fridge. As
she waits she recollects the aftermath of his death. This story, like many others in this
collection, is about not just the cruelty and indiscriminate nature of death, but also its
loneliness – symbolised here by the dark, cramped fridge – both for the deceased and their
loved ones. The strawberries on the shortcake are at first ripe and vivid, but quickly
discolour and wilt. This story has a strong sense of place and transports the reader smoothly
into a Japan of cats, drinking fountains and snap-happy tourists. The woman inside the
bakery, though, is alone, separate from that world. The next story, ‘Fruit Juice’, also features
bereavement and concerns a girl who, left alone by the death of her mother, goes to see the
father who abandoned them. It is not obviously connected to ‘Afternoon at the Bakery’ at
first, but we eventually learn that they share a common character, despite their
chronological displacement.

‘Old Mrs J’ – my favourite story within the collection – is a dark, modern and discreetly
sinister fairy tale. A writer – who features in many of the stories in a metafictional role – is
intrigued by her new landlady, who seems at times to be elderly and infirm, and at others
able and nimble. One day she gives the writer a carrot in the shape of a human hand. Soon
after, more and more of these carrots, replicas of the first, are gifted to everyone in the
building. This story – redolent of the Succubus myth – builds up tension very well and
maintains its intrigue until the end. In the next story, ‘The Little Dustman’, a young girl is
sat on a delayed train on her way to the funeral of a writer.

For ‘Lab Coats’ Ogawa favours a present tense reporting style. Here we are introduced to
another common theme in Revenge: the irrational power of obsessive – sometimes
unrequited – love. It is portrayed as a blind feeling that will forgive even the most despicable
acts. In the morgue of a hospital, two characters – one in love with the other despite their
cruel personality – itemise soiled lab coats. One of them is building up to a confession of
love, the other to a much darker revelation. Briefly revisiting the same hospital is the
protagonist of ‘Sewing for the Heart’. In this cleverly metaphorical tale of human isolation, a
bag maker is commissioned to make a pouch for a woman whose heart hangs externally at
her side. ‘Sewing for the Heart illustrates’ how a seemingly noble act can turn quickly sour,
how love can be dangerously possessive:

‘I wondered what would happen if I held her tight in my arms, in a lover’s embrace,
melting into one another, bone on bone… Her heart would be crushed. The membrane
would split, the veins tear free, the heart itself explode into bits of flesh, and then my desire
would contain hers – it was all so painful and yet so utterly beautiful to imagine.’ Pg 69.

The subsequent stories build on these same themes and delve into the part of the human
psyche that finds interest in the macabre, as well as the connection between sadism and
eroticism, love and hate. Another constant is the fear of the speed of death and of non-
existence (‘Why was everyone dying? They had all been so alive just yesterday.’ Pg 78).
Thematically, all of the stories fit snugly together to create a foreboding collage of the futility
of human relationships. And yet there is a vein of quietly optimistic beauty that runs
through each page, preventing the collection from leaving one numb.

The book is not without its faults. I found the voice of the male protagonists far less
convincing than their female counterparts; the voice differs very little from story to story,
and without a clear identification of gender, I found I was sometimes confused as to the
relationship of certain characters.

Some readers may also find the cruelty and violence in these stories – sometimes rendered
more acute for being perpetrated by young girls – exaggerated, stepping outside the realms
of the believable. Yet we have only to look at the recent case of the schoolgirl in Sasebo, who
beheaded her classmate and cut off her wrist because she “wanted to dissect someone”.
Sasebo had already seen a similar incident in 2004 when a schoolgirl killed her classmate,
and In 1997 a 14-year-old student killed two of their classmates in Kobe, leaving the head of
one at the school gates. It may be uncommon, but the cruelty is there, and nothing here
eclipses that horrifying reality.

Prior to Revenge I hadn’t had a great success rate with Japanese fiction by female authors. I
found Natsuo Kirino’s Out to be perfectly readable but misandristic in theme and so angry
as to be caricatured; in contrast, I found Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen sickly-sweet and
melodramatic. It was a pleasant surprise then that I found in Revenge something
intriguingly dark in tone, but also familiar and comforting, something sinister but not
depressing. Some of the stories do stand head and shoulders above the rest – I found ‘Lab
Coats’ the weakest of the bunch – and the breathless nature of the narrative sometimes
betrays the otherwise carefully established atmosphere. Having said that, I also have to
admit that these stories are at times masterpieces of the sinister undertone. In all, this is a
work that benefits from its sparseness and implies a world and narrative much wider than
the one on the page.

Revenge is space-conscious from the first sentence. Ogawa keeps details short and to the
point, but always picks those that paint a scene quickly and accurately. The book is quiet
and matter-of-fact as it describes nightmarish occurrences, sterile as it paints pictures of
violence, death, torture and love.

However, its most remarkable feature is its interconnectedness. The eleven haunting little
glimpses of lives intersect and entwine with each other to become a spider’s web of
interconnected plots. In the first story of the collection, “Afternoon at the Bakery,” a woman
buys a birthday cake for her dead son who suffocated in an abandoned refrigerator some
years earlier. She sees the baker crying on the telephone before she places her order, but
does not understand why. In the next story “Fruit Juice,” the reader is taken back to the
baker’s childhood and is shown why she cried on the phone that day. Each story connects
backwards or forwards with the others: the very last story is about the lonely old woman
who discovers the body of the young boy from the first story.

Death, cruelty and obsession abound in the connected lives of the characters. A young writer
watches her landlady murder her husband and bury him in the garden she cares for. A young
nurse becomes infatuated with another woman who has just killed her doctor lover. The
tiniest details have an element of horror about them: a dead hamster thrown in a trashcan, a
bloody hospital gown, a museum filled with instruments of human torture. The details and
the characters show up unpredictably throughout the eleven stories. The stories are also
dominated by feelings of loneliness and desire. The characters seem to live, work, and die in
isolation from the rest of society. The relationships the characters take part in end up in
abandonment. However, each story is too short and stark for any of this to become too much
for the reader to bear. Each story ends in a sharp shock which leaves the reader eagerly
turning to the next one.

Revenge is a perfect book for anyone who wants to read more, but doesn’t have unlimited
time. Each 15-page chunk of the book screams for a reader’s attention, and won’t leave a
readers mind until long after. In fact, the book’s conclusion tempts the reader to reread and
reconsider the web of relationships between the stories. Despite its brevity, Revenge is a
thought-provoking and powerful read.

by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen SnyderPicador, 20131Yoko Ogawa's Revenge is a story

collection born out of ancient Buddhist philosophy and into the fragments of the modern
world; it is a whole, beautiful tale of humanity in grief over its perceived brokenness.
Revenge is a short story cycle, but it doesn’t belong in the recognizable tradition of, say,
Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or James Joyce's Dubliners. It is only similar to
collections like these insofar as each story is complete and coherent if read out of context,
but each is also clearly tied to the other tales. Revenge is defined by its overwhelming
number of internal connections and replications, which themselves replicate one of the core
principles of Buddhist philosophy. This is a book about structure; it is a story about the
structure of reality itself.Revenge embodies what critic Forrest Ingram describes as the “one
and many” structure of all story cycles, but does so in a uniquely sophisticated way. Its
complex frame is rooted in essential questions about what it means to be human: in the
myriad complexities of interpersonal relationships. The architecture of human relations that
exists both beyond and deep within the murkiest parts of our everyday lives, as Ogawa
imagines it, is described in one of the oldest and widely known Buddhist philosophies—the
Hua-yen school. Buddhism has been one of Japan's primary religions since the sixth century,
and 70% of Japanese still identify as Buddhist; further, Hua-yen’s influence on Buddhism as a
whole, and therefore on Japanese Buddhism, cannot be underestimated. Indeed, as Francis
Cook notes in Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra, almost all manifestations of
Chinese and Japanese Buddhism “look to Hua-yen for their philosophical foundation. This is
particularly true of Zen, which is now the most widely spread form practiced.”2Cook notes
that because “Buddhism did arise in the East...there is a tendency to see things as described
by Hua-yen;” Buddhism's central tenets and images inflect Japanese cultural expression the
same way Christianity and Judaism infuse Western culture. The “image which has always
been the favorite Hua-yen method of exemplifying the manner in which things exist” is at
the heart of Ogawa's complex literary experiment; Cook sums up:

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net...
[stretching] out infinitely in all directions...[There is] a single glittering jewel in each “eye” of
the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number...If
we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will
discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite
in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting
all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring...[This]
symbolizes a cosmos in which there is an infinitely repeating interrelationship among all the
members of the cosmos.

To what purpose, what effect(s), does Ogawa draw on and reproduce this Buddhist
metaphor for reality and relationship? If form and content are bound up in one another,
then what is this collection about in a tangible, everyday sense? What does it mean that in
Revenge, everyone and everything continually reflects one another?
***
A traditional plot summary is impossible with a book like Revenge, in part because Ogawa
refuses, as she regularly does, to give her characters names. To provide plot descriptions
would require too much space—and the point of this book isn't plot anyway. Briefly, every
story connects each to the other and not only one-directionally. For example, the bumbling,
itinerant uncle from “The Man Who Sold Braces” is the curator in “Welcome to the Museum
of Torture.” In “Braces,” he is at the isolated and impoverished end of his life. The narrator of
“The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger” is the wife of the murdered doctor from “Lab Coats,”
going to confront her husband's mistress while he's away (in fact, dead). She gets lost and
ends up in the backyard of the Torture Museum with the curator/uncle from the preceding
two stories. Another representative set of connections, but certainly not all: “Afternoon at
the Bakery” is a story within “Tomatoes in the Full Moon,” and “Old Mrs. J” is both a novel
read in “Poison Plants” and the relation, at least in part, of “real” events in “The Little
Dustman.” The question then is, what is “real” and what is “fiction,” within the parameters of
this book? It's not simply that all the tales after “Old Mrs. J” are fictions within it. There is, in
fact, no origin or source story giving birth to other fictions in Revenge; all its stories are
originary—and issues of “truth” and “fiction” become subsumed in larger concerns about
autonomy and dependence.Alongside these defining leitmotifs, a number of other key
themes crop up in almost every story, such as grief, loneliness, modern ennui, desire, and
miscommunication—but none predominate. There is no frame narrative to reveal any
overarching narrative design. The book's title, Revenge, doesn't yield much either, as acts of
and desire for revenge are rare. The hospital secretary in “Lab Coats” enacts murderous
revenge when her boyfriend reneges on his promise to leave his wife. Old Mrs. J appears to
have murdered her husband, but the reason is not clear. And the narrator of “Welcome to
the Museum of Torture” dreams of revenging herself on her boyfriend by plucking out all his
hair, one follicle at a time, but is never given the opportunity to do so. The remaining eight
stories—even “Sewing for the Heart”—do not explicitly address revenge. If anything is being
avenged here, one might argue that it is the terrible fact of others' autonomy. The grief of
disconnection infuses all Ogawa’s tales; connections between the many individuals peopling
Revenge are too easily damaged or broken. Yet, the strengthening of these bonds occurs
precisely through the threat of their dissolution: if all beings are reflected in one another and
all Ogawa's characters' lives are connected, then of course their struggles are also essentially
similar. And what is more basically human than to struggle with the problem that is other
people?3In “Sewing for the Heart,” a singer commissions an artisanal bag-maker to construct
a custom container for her externalized heart. He becomes obsessed with her heart; denied
the opportunity to touch it during the final fitting process because she decides upon a risky
surgery to repair it, he goes to the hospital (where “Lab Coats” is set) to cut it out. The bag-
maker in "Sewing for the Heart" does not seek vengeance upon the singer because she
decides against the bag in favor of surgery; he cuts out her heart because the “beauty of the
heart oppressed [him],” and he aches for union with it and her:

I wondered what would happen if I held her tight in my arms, in a lovers’ embrace,
melting into one another, bone on bone...her heart would be crushed. The membrane would
split, the veins tear free, the heart itself explode into bits of flesh, and then my desire would
contains hers—it was all so painful and yet so utterly beautiful to imagine.

4The pain of separation renders the bag-maker unable to recognize another's right to
determine the course of her own life.No, revenge is not central to Ogawa's book. Indeed, the
original Japanese title of this collection is, romanized, Kamoku na shigai, Midara na tomurai
—or, according to the reviewer at Three Percent, Silent Corpse, Improper Funeral.
Translator Stephen Snyder, in response to my query about this wrote, “yes, that's an accurate
literal translation of the Japanese title—though ‘improper’ is the most ‘proper’ rendering of
the adjective midara na—it’s probably something closer to ‘lewd.’” The original Japanese title
reflects the book's exploration of humanity's cyclical, shared reality. “Poison Plants” is the
final tale in Revenge; it tells of a failed May-December romance in which an elderly female
painter patronizes a beautiful young music prodigy; in exchange for her paying for his music
lessons, he must visit her every two weeks and keep her company. He eventually backs out
of his commitment, however, and the narrator goes wandering in her grief and becomes lost.
Trying to find her way home, she discovers a body in an abandoned fridge; what she sees is a
body improperly laid to rest:

I opened the doors—and I found someone inside. Legs neatly folded, head buried between
the knees, curled ingeniously to fit between the shelves and the egg box.“Excuse me,” I said,
but my voice seemed to disappear into the dark.It was my body. In this gloomy, cramped
box, I had eaten poison plants and died, hidden away from prying eyes.

This body is not, or not only, her body, however. It is also the body of the dead boy in the
cycle's first story, “Afternoon at the Bakery.”In this opening tale, the bereaved mother
recounts to another bakery patron how her son died. Her language echoes that used by the
narrator of “Poison Plants:”

An old woman I had never seen before was standing nearby, looking dazed, and I realized
that she must have been the one who had found him. Her hair was disheveled, her face pale,
and her lips were trembling. She looked more dead than my son.“I'm not angry, you know,” I
said to him. “Come here and let me give you a hug. I bought the shortcake for your birthday.
Let's go back to the house.”But he didn't move. He had curled up in an ingenious fashion to
fit between the shelves and the egg box, with his legs carefully folded and his face tucked
between his knees. The curve of his spine receded into a dark, cramped space behind him
that I could not see.

The narrator of “Afternoon at the Bakery,” like that of “Sewing for the Heart,” finds the
agony of separation simply unbearable. She tries to re-create her connection with her dead
son through her annual purchase of his favorite birthday cake; but she also attempts to
achieve final union with him soon after his death:

The door that would not open no matter how hard you pushed, no matter how long you
pounded on it. The screams no one heard. Darkness, hunger, pain. Slow suffocation. One
day it occurred to me that I needed to experience the same suffering he had.First, I turned
off our refrigerator and emptied it: last night’s potato salad, ham, eggs, cabbage, cucumbers,
wilted spinach, yogurt, some cans of beer, pork—I pulled everything out and threw it aside.
The ketchup spilled, eggs broke, ice cream melted. But the refrigerator was empty now, so I
took a deep breath, curled myself into a ball, and slowly worked my way inside.As the door
closed, all light vanished. I could no longer tell whether my eyes were open or shut, and I
realized that it made no difference in here. The walls of the refrigerator were still cool.
Where does death come from?

Her attempted suicide is horrific, loving mimicry of her son’s last moments; it also reflects
“Poison Plants”’ narrator’s vision of her own death in the refrigerator, as well as her pain at
losing her protégé to the concerns of youth.5This replication speaks to the non-teleological
nature of experience and reality, another central Hua-yen concept. What is universally true
for Ogawa’s characters is this: they are tied not only by circumstances and physical
proximity, but their heartaches are also reflected constantly in one another's excruciating
isolation. Yet, this terrible isolation is drawn by a mild hand continually bringing the broken
into contact with one another. This gentle interconnectedness resides powerfully in the
Uncle from “The Man Who Sold Braces.” As the strange curator from “Welcome to the
Museum of Torture,” he takes pride in ensuring that the torture devices on display have seen
active use. But he's also a gentle, good-natured man, the favorite uncle of the narrator of
“Braces.” Looking back on Uncle's visits to his childhood home, the narrator of “Braces”
remembers him most for his physical affection and generosity; he “looked forward to my
uncle's visits with impatience—primarily because he never failed to bring me some rare and
unusual present...'Now where could it be hiding?' he would say, picking me up in his arms
and rubbing his cheek against mine.” “Braces” is an elegy for an uncle, once full of life, but
now on the verge of death, alone, in the filthy squat where his nephew pays him a final visit.
Concerned for his well-being, the narrator asks:
“Do you have a heavier blanket? You need to keep warm.”“I'm fine like this,” he said.
“You're the one who'll catch cold. You should wear this home,” he said, plunging his hand
into the mound next to him and pulling out a fur coat.“It's wonderful,” I said. “You should
use it for a blanket. I don't need it.”“Don't say that. I want you to have it. It's the only thing I
have to leave you.”“Well then,” I said. “Thank you.”He closed his eyes again and a look of
satisfaction spread over his face.

His uncle emanates this kind of profound gentleness again in “The Last Hour of the Bengal
Tiger,” when he brings the wife of the dead doctor from “Lab Coats” into a quiet, heart-
breaking circle with him and the museum's dying tiger:

“There now,” the man [said], wrapping his arms around the tiger's neck and rubbing his
cheek against its face.The roses swayed in the hot breeze. Tiny insects danced above the
lawn. Spray from the fountain misted down on us.“I'm afraid I'm disturbing you,” I said,
realizing that I was intruding on their last moments together.“Why would you say that?” the
old man said, a hint of reproach in his tone. “You must stay with us. We need you here.”
Then he looked back at the tiger, his eyes full of pity.The tiger's breath grew fitful. Its throat
rattled; its fangs clattered together. The tongue looked rough and dry. I continued to rub its
back; it was all I could do.The old man held his cheek against the animal's head. The tiger's
eyes opened and sought his face. When it was satisfied that he was still nearby, the eyes shut
again in relief.

The curator/uncle inhabits the interconnectedness described by Hua-yen philosophy. He

enacts and embodies it by unselfconsciously bestowing the same gesture of affection on the
tiger that he used to bestow on his nephew. His last moments with that nephew re-enact
this scene with the tiger, but with the roles reversed. The fur coat he gives his nephew with
which to brave the snowstorm is, inevitably, made from the remains of the tiger.
***
This never ends. Revenge is more than a collection of stories—it is a literary monument to
the mysterious labyrinth of shared human experience. Character studies, thematic analysis,
and plot construction make sense only in light of the book's structure. But because the
structure folds in on itself so frequently and in so many ways, writing a review essay about
Ogawa's tome is an act doomed to remain forever incomplete. The examples I've chosen to
quote here could easily have been replaced with any number of others; they are both
representative and incomplete. But this is, given the essence of Revenge, as it should be—no
beginning, no end. Only mirrors, reflecting infinitely.____Colleen Shea is a freelance writer
and recovering bookstore owner living in Toronto. She blogs at Jam and Idleness.
Presented as “Eleven Dark Tales,” Revenge is a collection of short stories, of sorts, but in
truth they begin to refer to one another in strange ways, finally coming together toward the
end. While each story stands on its own, a large part of the enjoyment is finding out how the
stories’ characters and themes come together.

The first story, and for me one of the most disturbing, is “Afternoon at the Bakery.” A
woman goes into a bakery to purchase some treat to celebrate her son’s birthday. Strangely,
the bakery, which usually has a line going out into the street, is empty. It’s open, but no one
is attending the woman. Eventually another woman enters the bakery, remarks how strange
it is that no one is there, and sits to chat with the first woman. Through their conversation,
the second woman learns it’s the first woman’s birthday. How old is he, she asks. “Six. He’ll
always be six. He’s dead.”

The story quickly becomes a horrific tale of loss:

He died twelve years ago. Suffocated in an abandoned refrigerator left in a vacant lot.
When I first saw him, I didn’t think he was dead. I thought he was just ashamed to look me
in the eye because he had stayed away from home for three days.

After losing her son, the woman can no longer function. Her marriage crumbles, and she
doesn’t really care. Obsessed with death, she clips any article she can find about children
dying. She replays her son’s terror in her head until:

The door that would not open no matter how hard you pushed, no matter how long you
pounded on it. The screams no one heard. Darkness, hunger, pain. Slow suffocation. One
day it occurred to me that I needed to experience the same suffering he had.

While for me this was the most successful story, I still found myself racing through the rest
of them, wondering why the stories seemed to pointlessly point to one another, obsessively
underlining these references and thinking about them. For example, in the second story,
“Fruit Juice,” we find out what happened to the young woman who was working at the
bakery the day it was empty. She’s in the back on the phone crying.

Perhaps one reason the first story worked so well for me is because the death it deals with is,
for me, the most terrifying, the most personal, the most innocent and accidental. The rest of
the stories tend to deal with someone dying of natural causes or, even more prevalent, with
someone being murdered or being the murderer. For me, those aren’t as visceral, though the
intrigue surrounding them is thrilling.
Best of all, almost all of the deaths happen slightly off-screen, our characters dealing with
them from a vantage point that is slightly removed. There’s a murder in room 508; one
character lives just below, one is looking for the physician who was killed, another is talking
to the woman who killed him. In some stories, as the characters go around, they see car
wrecks where, by the state of it, it’s obvious someone died. The characters are surrounded by
and think constantly about death. The woman in the first story is not the only one to find
some fascination with stories about the dead.

Yoko Ogawa has been gifting Japan with dark, obsessive fiction for over thirty years, but only
some of her work in currently available in English. Ogawa’s debut The Breaking of the
Butterfly won the 1988 1988 Kaien literary Prize, and since then she’s written a number of
bestselling and award-winning novels and short stories, two of which were adapted into
films. In 2006, she teamed up with a mathematician, Masahiko Fujiwara to write a non-
fiction work about the beauty of numbers titled An Introduction to the World’s Most
Elegant Mathematics. She won 2008’s Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection for The
Diving Pool.

Revenge, which came out in 1998 in Japan, was translated into English by Stephen Snyder in
2013. It’s what’s referred to as “a collection of linked short stories”—but here the links tend
to be macabre hinges that hint at a darker and far more frightening world than what we see
on the page.

There are many different ways to build worlds. Revenge does it through a series of nested
short stories. As you read each story, a character or detail from each one will carry over into
the next, linking the stories in surprising and unsettling ways. But this isn’t just a game of
spot-the-reference or an Easter Egg hunt—often Ogawa dispenses with the connection in
the first paragraph to move on to a deeper story.

In “Sewing for the Heart,” an expert bag-maker tries to make a purse to hold a woman’s
heart, which sits on the outside of her chest. He decides on a sealskin pouch, and in
measuring her heart, notices that her blood is “clear, not red, pumping through the fine
veins and arteries and then disappearing into her body.” We’re shown the heart, but denied
blood. That is, until halfway through the story, when the man’s hamster dies. Not knowing
what to do he wanders the city, mourning his pet, and finally gives up and stops at a burger
joint.

When I went to throw the trash, I slipped the hamster out of the pouch, on the tray next
to my food, and slid him into the bin. I don’t think anyone noticed.
He must be covered in ketchup by now.

Instead of blood we get ketchup. The animal proves to be the connective tissue this time, as
the next story, “Welcome to the Museum of Torture,” shows us a young woman spotting the
hamster’s body in the trash as she runs errands. She comments on the hamster, then talks
about a murder that occurred in her upstairs neighbor’s apartment, running over the details
several times and imagining her upstairs neighbor slashing a man’s throat. Here we get the
blood that was deferred in the previous story. After the woman’s boyfriend dumps her—
seemingly for being unhealthily excited about the murder—she goes wandering just as the
bag-maker did. Instead of a fast food restaurant, she finds the titular Museum of Torture.
The curator takes her on a guided tour, and she happily imagines using the instruments on
her now ex-boyfriend. Over only a few pages, Ogawa takes us from the sad, quiet death of a
pet, through a violent murder, and into imaginings of torture, each scene punctuated with
perfect details. Sometimes the connections are even more tenuous: in “Lab Coats,” one
character simply knows a character who was stuck on the stalled train from the previous
story, “The Little Dustman.” No other connection is needed—the same snowstorm that
delayed a man traveling to his stepmother’s funeral may have saved another man’s marriage.
The snow that caused so much pain a few pages ago now becomes an instrument of
benevolent fate… or at least, it seems to, until, another two pages later, Ogawa reveals that it
has also led to a murder.

Over the course of the book, Ogawa introduces us to hairdressers, hospital administrators,
schoolchildren, writers, editors, and bakers. She takes us through ever strata of society, and
in and out of spaces personal and private, each time with delicate control and intimate
familiarity. She has an extraordinary ear for dialogue, particularly for the sorts of dropped
bombs that show you what you need to know. And maybe best of all, she knows how to turn
a story. In the collection’s opening, we’re introduced to an idyllic town on a lovely day:

It was a beautiful Sunday. The sky was a cloudless dome of sunlight. Out on the square,
leaves fluttered in a gentle breeze along the pavement. Everything seemed to glimmer with a
faint luminescence: the roof of the ice-cream stand, the faucet on the drinking fountain, the
eyes of a stray cat, even the base of the clock tower covered with pigeon droppings.

The day is so perfect, even bird shit is made magical. A woman waits in a sunny bakery to
buy a pair of strawberry shortcakes—one for herself and one for her son. Another woman,
the proprietor of a spice shop, tells her all about the quality of the bakery’s goods, taking
special care to commend the baker for using her own shop’s spices:
“I can guarantee they’re good. The best thing in the shop. The base is made with our
special vanilla.”

“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.”

In one four-line paragraph Ogawa turns the story from a celebration into a nightmare. The
warmth of the day, the scent of pastries and fruit, the homely image of a mother buying
cakes for her son—all of them are peeled back to show a grieving woman who
commemorates her child’s life through a heartbreaking birthday ritual, and thinks nothing
of casually laying her pain out for a stranger to see. From this moment on you know you’re
in a far darker world than the one you first saw.

Some stories edge into supernatural horror: a gardener harvests a crop of hand-shaped
carrots, and the mystery is only kind of solved when a body turns up, also in the garden,
missing its hands; the aforementioned heart beats perfectly, exposed to open air; the woman
who’s lost her son receives a call from an alternate universe where the boy had a chance to
grow up. But most of the stories stick to pure modern Gothic: jealous lovers murder each
other; doomed children suffocate in refrigerators; pet tigers prowl immaculate gardens. The
whole book adds up to a tone more than anything else—the feeling that you’ve wandered
into a garden in time to hear a terrifying story, only to discover that you can’t find your way
out.

The first book I read for this column was Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus. One of my
favorite aspects of that book was the way Carter hopped in and out of different characters
points of view. She destroyed the idea of a “main character” because she treated everyone
like they were the main character of their own story. Ogawa does a similar thing through
these linked short stories. By taking us around this unnamed town, and spinning us off into
the lives of passersby, neighbors, pets, coworkers—Ogawa creates a living, thriving city full
of people with their own histories and narrative arcs. As in life, there are no side characters.
Each new character brings with them an entire history of desires and fears, and each story
contains an entire world of hope and horro