Perhaps one reason the first story worked so well for me is because the death it deals with is, for me, the most terrifying, the most personal, the most innocent and accidental. For example, in the second story, “Fruit Juice,” we find out what happened to the young woman who was working at the bakery the day it was empty. While for me this was the most successful story, I still found myself racing through the rest of them, wondering why the stories seemed to pointlessly point to one another, obsessively underlining these references and thinking about them. One day it occurred to me that I needed to experience the same suffering he had. The door that would not open no matter how hard you pushed, no matter how long you pounded on it. She replays her son’s terror in her head until: Obsessed with death, she clips any article she can find about children dying.

Her marriage crumbles, and she doesn’t really care. I thought he was just ashamed to look me in the eye because he had stayed away from home for three days.Īfter losing her son, the woman can no longer function. When I first saw him, I didn’t think he was dead. Suffocated in an abandoned refrigerator left in a vacant lot. The story quickly becomes a horrific tale of loss: Through their conversation, the second woman learns it’s the first woman’s birthday. Eventually another woman enters the bakery, remarks how strange it is that no one is there, and sits to chat with the first woman. It’s open, but no one is attending the woman. Strangely, the bakery, which usually has a line going out into the street, is empty. The first story, and for me one of the most disturbing, is “Afternoon at the Bakery.” A woman goes into a bakery to purchase some treat to celebrate her son’s birthday. While each story stands on its own, a large part of the enjoyment is finding out how the stories’ characters and themes come together. Presented as “Eleven Dark Tales,” Revenge is a collection of short stories, of sorts, but in truth they begin to refer to one another in strange ways, finally coming together toward the end.

Yoko ogawa revenge review