Even on full, the air conditioning did little against the heat coming through the window. The air shimmered above the burning asphalt the sunlight reflected from the oncoming cars was blinding. J," in which the narrator's landlady grows carrots in her garden in the shape of human hands.īut as you read along, you find Ogawa ascending into an orbit of her own - one that's at least as high as Murakami's - as in the story "Sewing for the Heart," which features a bag designer whose customer is a woman with her heart growing on the outside of her chest or in the flatly told but utterly bizarre trio of linked stories "Welcome to the Museum of Torture," "The Man Who Sold Braces" and "The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger. The breeze had died and the trees along the avenues seemed to wilt in the heat. In the opening story, "Afternoon at the Bakery," a customer comes into a shop to buy strawberry shortcake for, as it turns out, a child who died years before. The situations seem made for Murakami's particular blend of the real and the fantastic. Revenge is a gentle and unsettling collection of interconnected short stories focused mainly on death and grief and an inner darkness that plagues its eleven.
You certainly get that feeling of being haunted by Murakami when you begin reading the "Eleven Dark Tales," as she calls them, in this story cycle by Yoko Ogawa. I'm not making a perfect analogy when I suggest that most contemporary Japanese writers seem to be working under the shadow of Haruki Murakami, but I hope it highlights the spirit of the situation. It used to be a truism among critics of British poetry that Keats and most of his fellow Romantic poets worked in the shadow of John Milton.
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