Everything seemed to glimmer with a faint luminescence: the roof of the ice-cream stand, the faucet on the drinking fountain, the eyes of a stray cat, even the base of the clock tower covered with pigeon droppings.įamilies and tourists strolled through the square, enjoying the weekend. Out on the square, leaves fluttered in a gentle breeze along the pavement. The sky was a cloudless dome of sunlight. She establishes this atmosphere in the opening paragraphs of the first story, “Afternoon at the Bakery”: Ogawa is masterful at depicting a seemingly normal scene with a tinge of fear that all may not be as bland and routine as it first appears. Ogawa begins by showing her readers the apparently boring, normal face of human society, and then slowly lets this face of normality slide back to reveal decomposition, death, and emptiness. The collection has been described repeatedly as “Japanese Gothic,” a label which captures some of the atmosphere of ominous mystery in the stories, but which fails to convey the sense of almost sterile anonymity of her characters, or the precision with which Ogawa slowly builds a sense of horror to a crescendo by the precise description and accrual of detail after detail. Her most recent short story collection, Revenge, is likely to garner her attention from English-speaking fans of literary fiction, Japanese fiction, and horror alike.
Only four of her works have been translated into English. She has won five prestigious literary awards in Japan, and in 2008 was awarded the Shirley Jackson Award for “The Diving Pool,” a novella contained in the collection The Diving Pool. She has published over 20 books, short story collections, novels, and works of non-fiction. Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa, Translation by Stephen Snyder
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