“Why was everyone dying? They had all been so alive just yesterday.”
I am fascinated by writers who can conjure profound emotions
and themes in their stories through deceptively simple prose. Yoko Ogawa is one such writer I stumbled upon
in my literary wanderings to savor rich, wide variety of tales from Japanese literature. The
way the author slowly immerses us into her world of gloom, obsession, and
isolation reminded me of Haurki Murakami and Han Kang’s works. Revenge: Eleven
Dark Tales was published in Ogawa’s native country in 1998, and translated to
English in 2013 (by Stephen Snyder). The book consists of eleven loosely interlinked
stories that subtly explores the murkiest, complex, and darkest parts of human
relations. Revenge is neither traditional horror literature nor explicitly
details an account of violent retribution. I don’t know what the actual
Japanese title of the book insinuates ('Kamoku na shigai, Midara na tomurai'), but these tales are all distinct
portrayal of shared reality and cyclical moods or emotions that make up the
whole spectrum of human experience.
Though it doesn’t belong to horror genre, Revenge
immaculately builds a sense of dread which comes from precisely observing the
ennui, loneliness, and misplaced desires of modern human life. Adding more to the ominous atmosphere is the anonymity of the settings. The supposed
‘Japanese-ness’ is largely absent in the eleven tales and consequently could be related
to any place in the world; or perceive it to be unfolding in some darkest corners of our own
reality. No names are mentioned throughout and although every story is told in
first-person, at times it’s hard to understand whether the narrator is male or
female (the odd-number tales are narrated by women and even numbers by men). What
transfixed me more, while getting sucked into Ogawa’s orbit of fictional
reality are the mesmerizing meta-layers Ogawa strews throughout these utterly
bizarre short stories.
The first of the eleven tales titled ‘Afternoon at the
Bakery’ opens in one beautiful Sunday afternoon, detailing the seemingly normal
and cheery gathering of people in a quaint and attractive town square. The only
odd one out in this perfect setting is the square’s clock tower, which when
strikes five a little door opens beneath the clock and a parade of little
animated figurines – a soldier, a skeleton, and a chicken – spin out. Gradually,
the normalcy and beauty of warm sunlight and laughing children are smoothly
replaced with the dark and macabre. This is how Ogawa starts almost all her
tales: from picturesque to ghastly. In the first tale, a woman reaches a bakery
to buy strawberry short cakes. The cake is for her son and it’s his birthday,
but she reveals to an unknown woman that her son is dead for 12 years and forever
six years old. The details related to the boy’s death gets more bleak (a
traditional summary of the stories would only spoil the reading experience and
so I’d like to limit myself).
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| Yoko Ogawa |
Although the interlinked stories are not so far removed from
reality, the weird quotient gets consistently stronger. In “Old Mrs. J”, an old
landlady grows carrots in her garden in the shape of human hands. In “Sewing
for the Heart”, a bag designer is obsessed about making the perfect bag for a
woman’s heart that remains outside her chest. In “Welcome to the Museum of
Torture”, an old museum curator collects torture devices that were put to
‘good’ use. Nevertheless, what binds all the characters is the unshakable sense
of displacement and isolation the characters feel from their immediate surroundings. The
narrators are outsiders, trapped in their constantly destabilizing reality, and often
take drastic steps to free themselves. Ogawa brilliantly links each stories
through little details (the garden of kiwis, bakery shop, and museum making
multiple appearances; food and numbers also plays a pivotal role in the
inter-connection). Tracking the web of intersecting points constantly kept me
on the edge and added more to the captivating reading experience.
“The prose was unremarkable, as were the plot and
characters, but there was an icy current running under her words, and I found
myself wanting o plunge into it again and again”, a man comments on a tale
written by an obscure woman author (in ‘Tomatoes and the Full Moon’). Those
words convey the inherent meta-nature of the book, as if the writer is
remarking about her own writing style. Moreover, there are instances we aren’t
sure on whether we are reading a clear-cut fictional creation of Ogawa or the meta-fictional product supposedly created by one of Ogawa’s character. By
employing meta-layers, I felt Ogawa is playfully questioning the parameters of what
we considers as ‘real’ in fiction and further addressing the ‘truth’,
originating from fictional realm. What the author persistently zeroes-in on --
through her uncomplicated prose and simple settings -- is the every-day horror
that occupies our reality, from failing relationships to death and emptiness.
And of course, the horrors displayed in plain sight looks more terrifying than
haunted houses or monsters living deep in the woods.
Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales is an inventive and unsettling collection
of thinly linked short stories that pries into spectrum of dark human emotions
with unparalleled nuance and power. As an avid reader of dark, portentous
tales, I firmly recommend this one.
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