Revenge by Yōko Ogawa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Japanese Gothic

Revenge begins and ends in old, discarded refrigerators. The theme of fruit - growing, discarded, consumed and going bad - pervades the text. Characters, bizarre in their motivation and behaviour, appear and dissolve like vapour. Events become self-referential but which text precedes the other is unclear. The atmosphere is spectral but not supernatural.

Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor convinced me that she is not just a writer but also a complex and subtle intellectual. That there is a plan to Revenge and a key to understanding this plan therefore is therefore certain. Without this key, the work is intriguing but incomplete. In The Housekeeper and the Professor, it was the mathematical Euler’s Theorem. But what such a key could be in Revenge is, at least for the moments, beyond me.

Anyone with insights, please get in touch.

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