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Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales
Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales
Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales
Audiobook4 hours

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales

Written by Yoko Ogawa

Narrated by Kaleo Griffith and Johanna Parker

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

About this audiobook

An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Elsewhere, an accomplished surgeon is approached by a cabaret singer, whose beautiful appearance belies the grotesque condition of her heart. And while the surgeon's jealous lover vows to kill him, a violent envy also stirs in the soul of a lonely craftsman. Desire meets with impulse and erupts, attracting the attention of the surgeon's neighbor-who is drawn to a decaying residence that is now home to instruments of human torture. Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders-their fates converge in an ominous and darkly beautiful web.

Yoko Ogawa's Revenge is a master class in the macabre that will haunt you to the very end.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 8, 2013
ISBN9781452682907
Author

Yoko Ogawa

Yoko Ogawa is the author of The Diving Pool, The Housekeeper and the Professor, and Hotel Iris. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope. Since 1988 she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, and has won every major Japanese literary award. Her novel The Housekeeper and the Professor has been adapted into a film, The Professor’s Beloved Equation. She lives in Ashiya, Japan, with her husband and son.

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Reviews for Revenge

Rating: 3.8753753267267266 out of 5 stars
4/5

333 ratings26 reviews

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Just an awful narrator. Definitely read the physical book instead.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I decided to pick up this book based on the fact that the author had also written The Housekeeper and the Professor, a novel that I really enjoyed - and I am so glad that I did.Revenge is a collection of eleven eloquent, charmingly dark short stories, all of which are intertwined in different ways. The book impressed me more and more as I continued, and Ogawa’s intricate writing was a treat to read. The writing style is delicate, even cozy - and combined with the more macabre elements of the stories, it’s perfection.Each of the eleven stories is somehow tied to another, usually the one directly preceding it, in some small and often unexpected way. A character happens to glimpse a girl crying over a phone conversation, and in another story we learn the reason that she was in tears. A character finds piles of fruit in an unexpected place, and in the next story, we learn how it got there. These details are not so much defining plot points, but rather puzzle pieces that tie the storylines together in a very satisfying way. Most of the book seems to take place in the same town. Toward the end of the book, a character briefly mentions the town square in passing, and I found myself thinking “Oh, yes - I know that place. I know the bakery there, I know about the customers, I know about the girl who works in it.” It was a pleasant feeling, of having glimpsed into pieces of so many people’s lives - of hearing characters remark upon something that you know more about than they do. Because of the way that these stories seem to so seamlessly fit together, it would be easy to overlook the broad scope of writing abilities that Ogawa demonstrates here.She slips effortlessly between cozy and warm to chilling and creepy, but never abandons the overall tone of her writing: pretty, observant, concise.Some of the stories are sentimentally evocative: a man fondly remembers bonding with his stepmother as a young boy, a mother continues to celebrate her son’s birthday despite his death years ago. And then, there are the tales that are more dark - a woman stumbles upon the Museum of Torture, housed in a forgotten old building on the outskirts of town. A man is commissioned to make a bag to hold a woman’s heart, which is exposed outside of her body due to a medical condition - and he becomes strangely obsessed with it, and with the temptation of being able to kill her so easily. A couple of the stories even capture an ominous sensuality: a girl who works in a hospital is fascinated with one of her female co-workers, imagining sex scenes with her that involve medical procedures, the man crafting a bag for the woman’s exposed heart imagines making love to her so passionately that her heart bursts. The way that Ogawa writes this, stylishly, isn’t lurid at all, but rather seems to flit up to the edge of taboo and elegantly skirt over the boundary before tastefully moving on.In short, this book impressed me, and I will definitely be hunting down more of the author’s writing.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is the Yoko Ogawa book everyone should start with in my humble opinion!! ? the stories are immersive and hold your attention and so well written that I must obtain a copy for my collection! I very much look forward to reading her novels and will most definitely be on the lookout for more stories as I do love them!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It’s very strange unlike anything I’ve read before. I just kept reading to the end perplexed all the way I enjoyed it I will read more of this authors work
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This was like reading Shirley Jackson, but 100x better. One thing I like about Shirley Jackson is how she writes women who are just slightly off-center. The stories in Revenge have characters that give the same vibe, but the stories have more interesting plots and a more concise storytelling style than Jackson's works. Every story in Revenge is about some slightly weird character in some slightly weird situation. It's not full on horror at all, but the stories are meant to give you the creeps and keep you a little on edge as you wait to see how they'll resolve. These characters are the type of people you'd love to talk to in a café because they're fascinating, but you'd never invite into your home because they also give the impression that they're a hair's breadth away from losing their shit and stabbing you to death. There are stories that end in murder or include a murder, but they still manage to be rather tame.I was listening to this on audio and trying to figure out why this collection felt so old school to me and I'm pretty sure Ogawa excluded any mention of modern technologies from the text. If they were mentioned, they were just a blip in passing because I couldn't remember them. And this worked for me A LOT. These stories felt like they could have taken place at any point in the last 70 years. So much of the focus was on human connection and human sensation. And I think it made the unsettling vibes every character was giving off so much more chilling.The way all of these stories connect is so fucking masterful though and is why this collection is so great though. It really made me want to go all conspiracy theorist with the bulletin board and string to connect all the dots. But it also added so much re-read value to the collection. As you progress through the stories, you learn more about characters you were introduced to earlier on and it makes you want to re-read the earlier stories with this new information. One character in particular, who I only ever remember being called "Mama," appears often and is also sort of meta in that she's a writer who experienced and wrote about one of the stories for other characters in later stories to read about. Ogawa clearly had a lot of fun plotting this out and it is GOOD.Lastly, the symbolism. I listened to this on audiobook and was so consumed by the stories that I know I didn't pick up on all of the symbolism or meaning in the collection. We get repeated depictions of juicy fruits, decay, food as comfort, torture, aging, and death. But overall I felt this book was a sort of reckoning with aging, loss, and our inevitable deaths. Several times in the story, people lose touch with someone they cared about and receive news that they died all alone and the things they left behind amount to nothing but garbage. The translation of the original Japanese title is "Silent corpse, lewd mourning," which makes way more sense than "Revenge." I suppose there are characters in the collection who technically kill out of revenge, but they don't feel vengeful. They feel like they're losing their minds out of loss.Biting into fruit is often used as metaphor for the loss of innocence, so watching a strawberry shortcake decay, tomatoes get smashed into pulp on the street, a girl gorge on juicy kiwis as she's wracked with sobs feels symbolic of both growing up and loss. One character even invents a device that aims to help people grow taller but causes so much pain it's akin to torture. Another symbol of growing up and aging. Some people lose and lose and lose and leave nothing behind but a few fond memories. That's what I took away in this read, but I'm excited to give it a closer read in print and see if my thoughts change.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This series of interlocked tales is quirky and occasionally disturbing, but not especially memorable. It reminds me a bit of the work of the exceptional Scottish-Canadian author Eric McCormack, but McCormack's work is even stranger, much more disturbing, impossible to forget, and--to top it all off--often hilariously funny in the darkest ways imaginable. If you liked the tone of this work and the way the tales relate to each other, check out McCormack's "Inspecting the Vaults" (and the rest of his work, since it all--short fiction and novels--exists in the same so familar, but so twisted, world.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    First of all, whoever wrote the blurb on the book jacket has clearly not read the book. And the title was terribly chosen. Just an FYI.

    Now to what's really important. Maybe this is due to the translation, but Yoko Ogawa is like an artist who wants to paint with as few brushstrokes as possible. The spookiness is achieved by inserting a bizarre element into everyday happenings. This works to great effect in stories like "Old Mrs. J," where a writer's strange landlady finds carrots shaped like human hands growing in her garden. There are perfect sentences like the grotesquely funny "That evening, my potato salad had bits of the pinkie and the index finger."

    On the other hand, Ogawa is so minimalist that despite each story having a different narrator, she does not change the style or tone. This makes it so you cannot always tell who is speaking, and I mean basic info, like male or female, unless something like a boyfriend is mentioned. Perhaps this was intentional, but I'm not sure.

    This was a creepy story collection, though. From "Lab Coats" to "The Museum of Torture" I had an especially big case of THE SHIVERS. While it's not out-and-out horror, I wouldn't like to read it in an empty house at night.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Mildy creepy connected short stories. Not nearly as bizarre as Kelly Link's stories. Kudos to both author and translator.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was really good! This is my second book by Ogawa and I really like her writing. Like with any short story collection, I liked some stories more than other. I like the way all the stories tied into each other to create a bit of a broader story. Some of the last sentences of these stories really got me and there was some really great emotional impact in some of these stories. The subtitle for this is Eleven Dark Tales and there is definitely a range of darkness in these stories but I found all the stories at least interesting. I would definitely recommend this collection.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A haunting tesseract of a book, each story intersects the next sometimes including it as fiction. Death by murder and accident predominate though they do not overwhelm, as it is the present in almost every story that vibrates.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book features 11 interconnected short stories--they weave together in time and space, as characters, places, and events appear in more than one story (sometimes as a character or setting, other times as an aside). A young woman in one story is an old woman in another, and so forth.I also shelved this as horror, because a couple of the stories are horror--but not all of them are. It is an interesting and creepy collection.I listened on audio, and their were two narrators--one for the stories with female narrators and one for male. The male narrator was great. The female narrator is quite well known and has one book narration awards, but I found her somewhat odd southern accent to be rather off-putting for a book translated from Japanese that, as far as I can tell, can be assumed to take place in Japan. The male narrator has a standard American accent, so the switching between the two was also quite jarring.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A wonderful collection of short stories some dark some a little weird but all cleverly written. There is a loose connection theme running along side the clear prose that is always prevalent in Japanese literature. Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Revenge is a story that is divided into eleven parts. Each part on its own is creepy and satisfying in itself, but they are all connected; either by characters crossing paths or working/living in the same space. The readers have to read them all to see the bigger picture, and sometimes find out what really happened to the characters in previous stories.The first couple of stories almost turned me off. There wasn’t much depth to them on their own, but once I got the hang of how the book worked and understood those smaller stories were only bits and pieces of the larger story, the book grew on me. You find all different types of characters: cheating lovers, scorned workers, con-artists, and distant relatives; all plotting some type of revenge on those that had wronged them.The book can be slow at times. You have to read through a story that seems pointless at first, but fits in perfectly when you read all the stories together. Some of the characters are a little bland, but others pop out and you want to know more of their story. Overall, I had mixed feelings about Revenge. The way the stories slotted into place to make the big picture was creative and intriguing, but it was also a bit boring because they’re so disjointed on their own. It’s still a good read, but in order to give it a chance, you have to read the first 3-4 stories to start seeing how it works.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Beautifully interconnected and, in some instances, deliciously disturbing. I would certainly recommend this book to lovers of gentle horror and magical realism.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A collection of short stories from the author of Hotel Iris and The Housekeeper and the Professor. Each story stands on its own, but is also linked to one or more of the others, whether by a place, a person or, in one instance, the pages of this very book. There is an uncomfortable undercurrent to some of the stories, akin to that in Hotel Iris. Ogawa's skill with language makes each one seem gentle, almost harmless, so that the horror revealed so calmly feels more unsettling. I found the linking of the stories made me wish it was a novel. It would have been more satisfying that way. A three course meal instead of a buffet.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    These elegantly and intricately connected tales are less about revenge than they are about loss, longing, and jealousy. Vaguely macabre, more than one of the stories actually made me chuckle with appreciation for Ogawa's ability to twist ever so slightly the reader's grasp of reality. After reading the first two tales, I wasn't sure this collection was for me but after the fourth I went back and read those first two again and Ogawa's genius became apparent. The unfolding web of connections between characters, settings, events, and emotions is simply delightful. And Ogawa masterfully exposes the layers upon layers of her scheme. In "The Man Who Sold Braces" the narrator finds himself in a house full of antiques, most of them instruments of torture. He comments, "As I studied the mass more closely, I began to feel that it was not the product of random accumulation but that it actually had a coherent form all its own; and while the individual items were dirty and deteriorating, taken together they were like a strange piece of art." Indeed.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    An interlinked cycle of stories about revenge, murder and loss--all hovering just beneath the surface of an eerily normal world. Each story works as a standalone but they grow in power as they are read together--both because of the consistent set of themes but also because elements of each story show up in other stories (e.g., one story is about a writer who is writing one of the other stories, etc.) Many of them are macabre, for example a woman whose heart is outside her body, a bag-maker who sews an elaborate bag to hold it, but then when she decides that surgery will solve the problem and that she no longer needs the bag, the devastated bag-maker kills her. Another story is about a museum of torture--where all the objects were actually used in torture. Yet another is about a widow who grows carrots shaped exactly like hands in her garden--and then her dead husband is discovered buried in the garden, with his hands missing. You get the idea.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is by far the best book I've read this year. Each story intertwines with one another, and every horrifying tale brings you one step closer to the brink of insanity. You constantly find yourself searching for the how's and why's, but you only find yourself asking more questions. This is a great read for anyone daring enough to stare into the darkness and wonder what lies beyond.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The way Yoko Ogawa weaves the characters and situations together is amazing, and I love the way the novel turned full circle. Its cerebral, literary, floating. Every character was well defined and interesting--a woman with a heart outside her body, a curator of a museum entirely of torture devices, a paranoid old woman. Yoko Ogawa has a way of saying so much in such a small amount of space with equal parts sophistication and simplicity.

    This is a must read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The first story hooked me but was a little confused going into the second story but seeing how each story connected with the last story was amazing! I loved how it was written. I wouldn't call it a horror novel by any means but a good dark thriller would fit better. Really quick easy read. I had it done in a few hours and didn't want the stories to end!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I was surfing radio stations and happened to pause on an NPR review of Revenge by Yoko Ogawa, which was highly praised as a well-written collection of stories of psychological horror which are linked to one another by various common threads. I have always been drawn to horror, especially when it is not simply genre stuff, but when it steps nimbly out of character and into literature. And recently I have been reading Murakami, so I was intrigued by the prospect of reading another Japanese author. I put the book on my birthday list. It appeared in an Easter Basket from my daughter, on a weekend when we visited her to celebrate both my birthday and the Easter holiday. Meanwhile, my wife had been shopping too, and while she didn’t see Revenge at the book store, she did see The Housekeeper and the Professor, a novel by Ogawa, with a significant plug on the back cover from Junot Diaz, a favorite author of mine. So for my birthday I also received this Ogawa book. I read Housekeeper first (reviewed separately by me elsewhere) and was highly impressed with the style, the content, the writing. It is a beautiful novel. I liked it so much I immediately turned to Revenge, the collection of stories; I wanted more!Boy, was I surprised: as much as I have lauded the novel, the stories are brilliant, and perhaps even better. I say perhaps, because it is not really fair to compare Ogawa’s tales here with her other fiction. This is written with an entirely different structure in a style strikingly at variance from what you encounter in her novel. These stories are not only scary, they are downright creepy. This is the kind of horror at the root of an Edgar Allen Poe tale, or a Stephen King short story that is more about the human condition than about the supernatural, as opposed to the horror residing in Anne Rice, H.P. Lovecraft or the King stuff that features monsters and such. Reading Revenge – which I actually inhaled over a day and a half -- I got that same pit in my stomach feeling of impending creepy terror that I experienced on my first drive-by of Silence of the Lambs. Of course, there are no serial killers here (or are there?). The random elements that link the stories are hard to spot at first – I found myself returning to ones read earlier to more carefully re-read the recurring reference – as the sequence builds the sense of interconnectedness emerges, far more subtly than say, in the movie Crash, but nevertheless there is this sense that we are all (and quite disturbingly the reader gets sucked into it too!) ineluctably wound up in this universe upon which everything is touching upon something else; and it is terrible universe after all. I highly recommend Revenge. Outstanding on every level. And I can’t wait to read more Ogawa!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This strange labyrinth of tales is a representation the way humans are connected to one another - each of us the main character of our own story, and never getting more than a glimpse of somebody else's story. Narrators in Ogawa's tales show up again and again as minor characters in other parts of the collection... so much that they are a confused bundle of people by the end. And is anyone telling the truth?

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Delightfully disturbing, and the interlinking of the stories was exquisitely done. These aren't really horror stories, but the overall effect is indeed horrific. Recommended to fans of Dexter who don't absolutely require the sense of humor.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Exquisitely unsettling. That’s the only description I can come up with for this finely understated story collection that creeps in under your skin, unobserved, and niggles at the subconscious mind until you’re afraid to let a breath out. It’s actually pretty darn scary, how good Ogawa is at frightening you in the most polite way. The stories are all connected: with the one before it, the one after it, the one at the end with the one at the beginning until you finally have so many connections your head is swimming. Her brilliance cannot be denied. The prose is spare and evocative. And when you get to the end you realize that she crafted a unique puzzle.The stories are peopled by seemingly normal characters: a bakery worker, a hospital secretary, a respiratory doctor, an author. But at some point, for varied reasons, they all come unhinged, in one way or another. In many cases, the ordinariness of life itself, grates on the individual with its loneliness, monotony, sadness and loss and finally pushes the character to the edge of insanity where it sits, waiting to go over the brink.In one story, Sewing for the Heart, a woman whose heart is outside of her body commissions a bag maker to make a bag that will neatly hold the heart in place. When he goes to deliver it to her, she informs him that she no longer needs it, because the surgery to fix her problem has finally been perfected. I’ll spare you the gruesome details of his response. In a later story, the very bag shows up in the story entitled Welcome to the Museum of Torture. You’ve probably never been to a museum like this where various methods of torture reside. For instance, there’s a funnel that is used to drip cold water on the victim’s face:”For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls , drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they literally explode, and every sensation in the body is absorbed into that one spot on the forehead---indeed, you come to feel that you are nothing but a forehead, into which a fine needle is being forced millimeter by millimeter. You can’t sleep or even speak, hypnotized by a suffering that is greater than any mere pain. In general, the victim goes mad before a day has passed.” (Page 94)Grim and unsettling. Brilliant and poignant. Elegantly written yet with tremendous emotional impact.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The quiet tone of these eleven stories is only one thing that belies the disturbing nature of these tales of suffering, loss and people who become "damaged, ruined beyond repair." Normally when I pick up a book of short stories I am expecting the typical anthology where sometimes when I'm lucky, there is a clear thematic structure that binds the narratives together, and I was expecting something along these lines as I started the first page. I wasn't disappointed; frankly, I was quietly surprised when I started to discover connections between the stories. It started slowly at first, but as they started popping up more frequently, I stopped reading, went back to the beginning and grabbed a notebook and a pen. Starting over and reading much more carefully, the connections started leaping out at me and I was sucked right into this strange world of this seaside town. What is also striking about these stories is that each one seems to open rather benignly, inviting you in. Little by little you start to get used to the environment and maybe for a little while feel comfy where you are. The first story, "Afternoon at the Bakery," for example, begins with a look at a nearly picture perfect scene of families strolling through a square during "an afternoon bathed in light and comfort," kids watching a balloon man ply his trade and a woman knitting on a bench. From there the action shifts to a bakery, where "everything looked delicious," with the "sweet scent of vanilla" hanging in the air. Once you've grown accustomed to your surroundings, however, you realize that something is just a bit off-kilter. The first hint comes when there's no one at the counter to help the customer/narrator who comes in, even though the friendly woman smelling of "overripe fruit" who pops in shortly afterward assures the customer that she's sure the girl will be right back. As the two women start making small talk it turns out that the customer is there to buy her son strawberry shortcake for his birthday:"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." Yikes. Not only is the boy dead, but he had died twelve years earlier, suffocating in an abandoned refrigerator. Even stranger is what the second woman says to the boy's mother: "Well,...then it was lucky you chose this bakery. There are no better pastries anywhere; your son will be pleased. And they include a whole box of birthday candles for free. They're darling -- red, blue pink, yellow, some with flowers or butterflies, animals, anything you could want." The story continues to darken and to take strange turns with the mother's memories of the day her son died and how she suffered in the aftermath; and by now you have been jolted out of the comfort of the warm, cozy, vanilla-scented bakery and thrust into a strange and growing darkness. Even the scene in the square takes on a surreal tone as the clock strikes five. People gather to watch the little automata come out of the clock door, but what emerges is not what you'd expect: instead it's a parade of a chicken, some soldiers, and a skeleton, followed by an angel who is "beating her golden wings."I'm not going to go into the other ten stories but the point is that each starts out so normally that you truly can't even begin to imagine what is waiting in store for you as you turn each page. As you read, as each story unfolds, the connections that are found in each and every story only heighten the strangeness -- until the last story brings about quite possibly the strangest tie of all, reminding you that there is no end to it all. Suffering and pain, death and loss are all connected here in this fictional world, just as they are in the real one, but here the author makes the links painfully clear where that's not always possible in reality. She does it in such a way that seemingly normal situations head down a path where these connections all resonate within a bizarre, claustrophobic and eerie atmosphere. I have to say that I have never in my entire life read anything quite like Revenge, and I probably never will again. It is truly a masterpiece of darkness and the best advice I can offer is this: run, do not walk to your nearest bookseller to pick up a copy, or get on your computer and order it online. You definitely do not want to miss this very strange but at the same time magnificent little book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This grouping of clever and gracefully written stories, I really enjoyed. It was fantastic how the author weaved something from one of the stories into another, it was almost like receiving a King cake at Mardi Gras, and discovering the prize. Some were about revenge but others were just deliciously creepy. I think these are some of my favorites so far.