She had no friends to speak of, belonged to no clubs, and she ate her lunch in a corner by herself.

She almost never spoke in class, and when asked to stand up and translate a passage from English, or to solve a math problem on the board, she did it as discreetly as possible, without fuss. She was an inconspicuous girl, perhaps the quietest in our grade. Many live alone, their lives infused with sadness and loneliness: In Revenge we meet characters who seem isolated or detached from society in some way. The stories in Revenge explore some pretty dark themes, and in this respect there’s a clear connection to Ogawa’s earlier collection The Diving Pool, which Naomi and I both read earlier this year. And strawberry shortcakes crop up again in a later story (‘ Welcome to the Museum of Torture’) when another girl buys cakes (from the same bakery, as it happens) for a dinner with her boyfriend. This story ends before we learn more about the patissier but she reappears in the next tale (‘Fruit Juice’) where we discover the source of her sadness. At first the bakery appears to be empty, but then the woman notices the patissier standing in the kitchen sobbing gently while talking to someone on the telephone. To give you an example, the collection opens with ‘Afternoon at the Bakery’ in which a woman visits a bakery to buy two strawberry shortcakes for her son’s birthday. It’s all very cleverly constructed and part of the satisfaction in reading Revenge comes from spotting the connections between characters, scenes and narrative fragments throughout the collection.

Characters flow from one story to the next we revisit specific locations and scenes from earlier tales, only to see things from a different viewpoint as our perspective has changed. Revenge is a stunning yet unsettling collection of eleven interlinked short stories while each individual tale works as a short story in its own right, they are elegantly connected by a set of recurring images and signifiers threaded through the stories. Ogawa is one of two female writers from Japan to make the cut this year the other is Hiromi Kawakami for her novel Strange Weather in Tokyo which both Naomi and I have already reviewed for January in Japan, an annual focus on Japanese literature hosted by blogger (and fellow IFFP shadow-judge) Tony Malone ( My review Naomi’s review.) When the independent Foreign Fiction Prize (IFFP) longlist was announced in early March, I was thrilled to see Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge among the contenders.

I have to say I’m very keen to read this now. Today it’s Jacqui’s second Independent Foreign Fiction Prize review.

Revenge book yoko