Revenge

November 12, 2012
Weaving together the morbid tales of 11 unnamed narrators, prolific Japanese author Ogawa (Hotel Iris), a Shirley Jackson Award winner, presents an intense rumination on the precariousness of interconnected lives. A jigsaw pleasure comes from anecdotes and details slipping into place between most stories, deepening characters and thematic resonance. In “Old Mrs. J,” a struggling novelist recalls the antics of her next-door neighbor, who discovers “a carrot in the shape of a hand” in her garden. Later, the handless body of her ex-husband also turns up in the soil. “Sewing for the Heart” is an intricate character study examining the life of a bag maker commissioned by a woman whose vulnerable heart rests outside her chest: “It could fit in the palm of my hand. A pale pink membrane of delicate muscle tissue surrounded it. What extraordinary, breathtaking beauty!” The final story, “Poison Plants” ties up a lot of loose ends and includes a brief authorial transparency that helps seal the spartan collection. The thrills are sometimes cheap and the connections between stories membrane thin, but Ogawa makes it count with her precision and dedication to bringing the vision full-circle. Agent: Anna Stein, Aitken Alexander Associates.

November 15, 2012
Ogawa (Hotel Iris, 2010, etc.) crafts 11 interlocking short stories with eloquent prose that belies the nature of the tales she spins. A mother walks into a bakery to buy two strawberry shortcakes for her son's birthday, a child who's been dead for 12 years. A girl asks a classmate to accompany her to a meeting with her father as her mother lies in a hospital bed dying of cancer. What appears to be a collection of sympathetically worded, yet familiar, short stories then veers into the unexpected. With dark calm and disquieting imagery, the author leads readers on a journey of the macabre in a progression of tales that resound long after the last page is turned. An aspiring writer discovers that her landlady, who grows carrots shaped like hands, is a murderer. A cabaret singer whose heart developed outside her body asks a bag maker to sew a special one to house the heart, making it less cumbersome to carry, but she then tells him she's having a surgical procedure to have the heart placed in her chest. A beautician tours a museum that houses torture devices and imagines using tweezers to pluck out her boyfriend's hair, strand by strand, as he watches in a mirror, bound and helpless. Ogawa's writing is simple and effective, and her technique for merging the tales demonstrates her mastery of the written word: A dead hamster tossed into a trash can in one story is glimpsed by a character in another; an uncle who invents a brace to lengthen the body becomes the caretaker of a museum, which then becomes the setting for other narratives. And although the stories may be perceived as gruesome, the author paints each tale exquisitely. Well-written.

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December 15, 2012
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)