![]() ![]() The slim volume contains 11 short stories, all of which revolve around the same cast of uncompromisingly reserved characters. ![]() Ultimately, while such a strategy could work to augment fear of the unknown by avoiding the outright macabre, “Revenge” fails as a lesson in disassembly and distraction that ultimately pushes the work a step too far from its gory core, leaving the action congealed. Her strategy of shrouding the bloody deaths and tortuous lives is completed by focusing instead on symbolic use of the mundane-of kiwis and tomatoes, of cakes and aging tigers. ![]() Ogawa pulls the reader into a stiflingly morbid universe without ever directly focusing her lens on the dark happenings, and the work thus suffers from an overreliance on disconnected rhetoric and a pervasive nightmarish slowness. Ogawa’s prose, in opting to shroud the details of the boy’s death, instead casts a sense of unease and suspicion that carries throughout the collection, only to be left vexingly unresolved by the final rediscovery of the still unexplained corpse. Another author might have engineered such a specifically macabre framework with the goal of explaining the circumstances of the child’s death and his placement in the refrigerator throughout the collection’s action. Yoko Ogawa’s short story collection “Revenge” begins and ends with the discovery of a six-year-old boy’s corpse folded up inside a refrigerator. ![]()
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