FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE MEMORY POLICE 'A conspicuously gifted writer To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state tinged with a nightmare, and her stories continue to haunt. She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance' GuardianMurderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders locked in the embrace of an ominous and darkly beautiful web, their fates all converge through the eleven stories here in Yoko Ogawa s Revenge. As tales of the macabre pass from character to character an aspiring writer, a successful surgeon, a cabaret singer, a lonely craftsman Ogawa provides us with a slice of life that is resplendent in its chaos, enthralling in its passion and chilling in its cruelty. Translated by Stephen SnyderElegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.
Beautiful, twisted and brilliant - discover Yoko Ogawa.
A woman goes into a bakery to buy a strawberry cream tart. Another customer comes in. The woman tells the new arrival that she is buying her son a treat for his birthday. Every year she buys him his favourite cake; but her son died in an accident when he was six years old.
From this beginning Yoko Ogawa weaves a dark and beautiful narrative that pulls together a seemingly disconnected cast of characters. Filled with breathtaking images, Ogawa provides us with a slice of life that is resplendent in its chaos, enthralling in its passion and chilling in its cruelty.
'The odd stories of Yoko Ogawa errupt from the ordinary world as if from the unconscious or the grave? the overall effect is more David Lynch' Economist
'Always eerie, often erotic, full of living ghosts and uncanny visitations, Ogawa's terse and spooky fiction folds Japan's supernatural tradition into her idiosyncratic brand of Asian goth' Independent
'Haunting?using economical and precise language, Ogawa conveys intensity of emotion' Times Literary Supplement
'Like Haruki Murakami, Ogawa writes stories that float free of any specific culture, anchoring themselves instead in the landscape of the mind' Washington Post
