Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales
Praise for Ogawa’s fine-spun and unnerving fiction continues to escalate. He won the Shirley Jackson Award for The Diving Pool (2008) and was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize for Hotel Iris (2010), and Ogawa is just as imaginative, seductive, and disconcerting in this piquant sequence of 11 “dark tales” chained together in unexpected ways. Things start out gently, if spookily, with a grief-addled woman waiting to be served in a bakery. Later we learn who was crying in the backroom and why. A schoolgirl whose mother is dying meets her father, a “relatively well-known politician,” for the first time, then breaks into an abandoned post office that is filled with kiwis. A young writer is startled when her strange landlady presents her with a hand-shaped carrot. A man who makes custom handbags slips into madness after taking on a bizarre commission. Anger, mayhem, and murder are in the air, yet Ogawa lulls us with psychological tenderness and evocative details until the macabre bursts forth full strength. These are delectably fantastic, endlessly intriguing tales of obsession, revenge, and unforeseen interconnections. --Donna Seaman