Yoko Ogawa's Revenge is a delicious mosaic that concerns much more than its titular subject. These 11 compulsively readable tales that become increasingly multilayered and interlocked are elegant and literate, unvarnished outtakes from reality, disturbing glimpses at the calamities of urban existence.
Every story is told by a different unnamed character. A woman stops into a bakery that appears to be momentarily untended and waits for a clerk who never appears. A shy, lonely girl asks her school friend to accompany her on a lunch date with the wealthy father she's never known. A writer takes a room in an old apartment house where the widow who owns it is growing five-pronged carrots that look remarkably like human hands. A beautiful nurse gets tired of waiting for a married doctor to tell his pregnant wife that he wants a divorce.
Ogawa's characters are subtle and quirky; they have real-world jobs and notice different kinds of details. The stories unexpectedly dovetail: the narrator of one story, for example, is the mother of another's narrator. These are tragedies within tragedies, so that an accident on the highway that slows down traffic in one story becomes the subject of the following one.
By the end, Revenge has circled around to its own beginning in an elaborate spiderweb of storylines, and the reader is left facing the terrifying interconnectedness of life, where our narratives all crisscross and our pivotal moments are merely plot bumps in everyone else's stories. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.