Revenge

Reviews

Mayavie

And this particular work of hers, translated from the Japanese by the ever reliable Stephen Snyder, makes for a perfect case study to demonstrate the superiority of terror over horror. The garden-variety strawberry, of the colour of blood and shaped like a heart, is ruined for me forever. In the best possible way. There’s one about a caretaker of a strange museum of torture.

Yet another features a woman born with her heart growing outside her chest. One story features a dizzying scene of a make-shift warehouse filled with enormous heaps of kiwis. There are eleven such weirdly fantastic individual short stories interconnected like a rat king, persons or events of one story making a guest appearance in the next till we come full circle.

Another, a crop of human hand-shaped carrots. Ogawa is one of my favourite authors, Japanese or otherwise. When the writer is Yoko Ogawa, everyday produce such as strawberries, kiwis, carrots and tomatoes can be sprinkled with the fairy dust of quiet terror. How does an author paint a picture of the macabre, without shedding a drop of blood?