Today's Sunday Guardian column.
One
of the more commented-on aspects of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby was the decision to never show the face of the said
baby. Rightly so, for dread, when left to the imagination, is more palpable
than when every detail is depicted. This is what comes to mind when reading
Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge, a collection of
11 dark tales, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder. Ogawa’s stories
don’t depend on the satanic, but on the malevolent forces that lurk in the
heart of the everyday.
Revenge
is one of the six titles on the recently-announced Independent Foreign Fiction
Prize Shortlist, an award that recognizes the author as well as "the
importance of the translator in their ability to bridge the gap between
languages and cultures". For the
first time, two female writers from Japan appear on the list, the other being Hiromi
Kawakami for Strange Weather in Tokyo (which
appears to be a Murakami-style meditation on love and loneliness).
The
particular eeriness of Ogawa’s interlinked tales comes from the contrasts
between the subject, her quiet language and the unhurried release of
information. Her characters are people whom life has pushed to the margins: an unassuming
student whose mother is dying of cancer; an unfairly jilted beautician; a wife
separated from her family and trying to be a writer; a mother who’s dealing
with the loss of her young son. In many cases, the stories have a similar
structure, first person narratives that start with a period of waiting – on a
train journey, in a bakery, in a hospital – which is then intercut by
distressing memories from the past.
The
linkages between them are ingenious and carefully structured. In one story, we
read of an abandoned post office filled with kiwifruit, an oddity explained by
the actions of a character in the next. In another, a character throws a dead
hamster into the trash, spotted by another in the tale that follows. Sometimes,
characters are linked by location, as when one of them speaks to her boyfriend
of a murder in the flat above, an incident that forms the submerged climax of
another story. In yet other cases, a story is revealed to be one that’s written
by an earlier character.
Ogawa’s
metaphors go a long way in adding to the oddness. Most of them are drawn from routine
objects and sounds: a mis-struck violin is “like the cry of a small bird”; a
carrot is “in the shape of a hand”; a laundry cart rolls down a corridor “as
though pushed by an invisible hand”; a dried-up plum emerging from a pocket
“looks like a testicle”. (Ouch.)
A
passage in one of the stories, during which a bag-maker muses on her profession,
could well be a metaphor for Revenge’s
act of creation. When she makes a bag, she says, she first pictures how it will
look when it’s finished. Then, she sketches each imagined detail, “from the
shiny clasp to the finest stitches in the seams”. Next, “I transfer the design to pattern paper
and cut out the pieces from the raw material, and then finally I sew them
together”. As the bag takes shape, “my heart beats uncontrollably and I feel as
though my hands wield all the powers of the universe”.
The
bag-maker’s story, arguably the most chilling of the lot, moves away from the
quotidian and exists at an angle to reality. She’s depicted as obsessed by one
of her customers, a nightclub crooner who, because of a congenital defect, has
her heart outside her chest. Another such story portrays the curator of a
domestic museum of implements used for torture, who cares for a Bengal tiger in
his garden.These are exceptions that veer towards the fantastical, but what is
common to the collection lies in the words of a character who, when conversing
with another, notices the “icy current running under her words”. The iciness of
Ogawa’s vision reinforces the old saying that revenge is a dish best served
cold.
