Ross Turner

Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge and Interconnected Circularity in Short Story

Cycles

Introduction
There is ongoing disorientation as to what a short story cycle actually is, and what makes
it different to a short story sequence, composite, collection, or different again from a
composite, fragmented, polyphonic, or networked novel, or even from a novel-in-stories,
or anti-sequence. A range of notable, contemporary examples spring to mind, such as
Rachel Cusk’s (2006) Arlington Park, Chuck Palahniuk’s (2009) Haunted, Tim
O’Brien’s (2009) The Things They Carried, Donal Ryan’s (2012) The Spinning Heart,
Colum McCann’s (2015) Thirteen Ways of Looking, and Julianne Pachico’s (2017) The
Lucky Ones, to name but a few. Some academics in the field provide extensive
chronologies of comparable composite works and their precursors, such as Dunn and
Morris (1995, pp. xix-xxxi), whose chronology dates back to 1820, identifying Melmoth
the Wanderer by Charles Maturin and The Sketch Book by Washington Irving as early
precursors of the genre. So why, if these styles of work have been around for so long, is
there so much confusion? Nagel (2001, pp. 1-17) suggests ‘the role of the short-story
cycle has been largely unrecognised in literary scholarship, overlooked and
misunderstood despite its essential role in the development of the national literature.’
Citing works such as Sherwood Anderson’s (1919) Winesburg, Ohio, Ernest
Hemingway’s (1925) In Our Time, and William Faulkner’s (1951) Knight’s Gambit,
Nagel, and separately Smith (2018, pp. 1-11), both discuss how the genre has been
reinvented (or at least perhaps rediscovered) numerous times, with each new iteration
being heralded as unique; they even suggest that this in many ways reflects ‘the
contingency and flux of modern life’, capturing ‘elemental truths about modernity’
(Smith, 2018, pp. 1-2). It is not necessarily the case that all works of this kind – despite
what they are named – must capture these truths specifically, but arguably they offer
‘plurality and openness’, ‘contest boundaries’, and enact ‘the possibility of multiple
beginnings and renewable identities’ (Lister, 2007); and, in addition to all of this, they
must also be ‘a set of stories so linked to one another that the reader’s experience of each
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is modified by his experience of the others’ (Ingram, 1971, p. 13). Arguably, this latter
point is one of the most crucial for the genre, but it is in precisely how and why stories
are linked and modify the reader’s experience that the crux of the genre might be
revealed. Yoko Ogawa’s (2014) Revenge adheres to these criteria, capturing truths about
the human condition and providing interlinked short stories that modify the reader’s
experience of every other story. Yet, Revenge seems to go further, providing the reader
with something more; the work’s interconnected circularity has a striking effect on the
reader, perhaps suggesting that all cycles, sequences, composites, etc, whilst
synonymous, are not equal.

Revenge – an Overview
Revenge consists of eleven short stories – described as ‘Eleven Dark Tales’ (Ogawa,
2014) – each of which is a complete story in and of its own right but, equally, each of
which is interconnected with every other story in a circular fashion. The stories are:
‘Afternoon at the Bakery’; ‘Fruit Juice’; Old Mrs. J’; ‘The Little Dustman’; ‘Lab Coats’;
‘Sewing for the Heart’; ‘Welcome to the Museum of Torture’; ‘The Man Who Sold
Braces’; The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger’; ‘Tomatoes and the Full Moon’; and ‘Poison
Plants’. In the following brief overview of the stories, I attempt to draw specific attention
to this interconnected circularity so that it can be further discussed more easily.
Revenge opens with ‘Afternoon at the Bakery’, wherein the first-person narrator
visits a bakery on their son’s birthday to buy him a strawberry shortcake, but the narrator
soon reveals to another customer that their son ‘died twelve years ago. Suffocated in an
abandoned refrigerator left in a vacant lot.’ The narrator describes how their son had
folded himself up ingeniously in order to fit into the refrigerator, legs bent, face tucked
between his knees, spine curved and cramped. The narrator describes how, after
discovering his body, they kept the two strawberry shortcakes they were supposed to
have eaten together, and instead watched them rot away. Then, whilst waiting to be
served, the narrator notices a young woman on the telephone in the back kitchen, crying;
they wait for her to be ready, rehearsing the words for their strawberry shortcake order
before the woman appears, so as not to disturb her prematurely.
Next, in ‘Fruit Juice’, a different first-person narrator is approached by a young
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woman in their school library; she asks the narrator to accompany her to lunch at an
expensive French restaurant; her mother is dying and has instructed her to contact her
father, whom she has never met. Conversation between the young woman and her
wealthy, estranged father (a politician) is flinty, and the narrator feels as though they are
‘of no use whatsoever’. Her father insists on driving them home, but the daughter refuses.
They sit down together on the steps of an old, abandoned post office on their way home;
she thanks the narrator, who in turn says they would like to visit her mother in hospital.
They peer into to post office and see a mountain of kiwis inside. The girl smashes the
lock and gorges herself on kiwis (having already overindulged at lunch); the narrator
‘could only watch and wait until she ate through her sadness.’ The young woman and
narrator do not speak again at school. The young woman’s mother dies without the
narrator making their promised visit. Years later, the narrator comes across the obituary
of the young woman’s father, and telephones her at the bakery she now works at. The
narrator apologises for not having been more helpful; the young woman cries during the
call, and apologises for not thanking the narrator properly at the time.
‘Old Mrs. J’ opens with another first-person narrator moving into an apartment
overlooking a kiwi orchard. The narrator lives across from the landlady, Mrs. J, who
cultivates the orchard and distributes fruit to her favourite tenants. The narrator becomes
familiar with Mrs. J’s routine, and also notices that, periodically, all the kiwis seem to
disappear from sections of the orchard. Mrs. J hates cats but, after the narrator advises her
to spread pine needles to deter felines, Mrs. J. consequently begins to bring fruit and
vegetables for the narrator, and visit for tea. She notes specifically that the narrator is a
writer, that they seem tense and stiff from sitting all day, and offers them a massage. The
narrator asks what Mrs. J’s husband did, and she explains ‘He was nothing but a lousy
drunk’ who gambled the money she earned, and eventually ‘went missing down at the
beach.’ One day, Mrs. J visits the narrator in a state of ecstasy, bringing with her ‘a carrot
in the shape of a hand’ that she had dug out of her garden. The next night, the narrator
sees Mrs. J running from the darkness of the orchard carrying a large box, and enter the
abandoned post office, moving seemingly with more grace and strength and swiftness
than the ‘normal’ Mrs. J the narrator knew. Mrs. J digs up more hand-shaped carrots,
which attracts the attention of the press, who come to photograph the phenomenon. Later,
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the narrator is interviewed by an inspector, who asks if the narrator knows anything about
Mrs. J’s husband, or if they have seen anything suspicious. The narrator repeats what
Mrs. J informed them about her husband, and about seeing her running down to the
abandoned post office. The post office is searched: the inordinate amount of kiwis are
removed; a dead cat is found; and, when the ground is dug up, the corpse of Mrs. J’s
husband is found – he has been strangled and his hands are missing.
Fourth, in ‘The Little Dustman’ the first-person narrator travels by train to attend
Mama’s funeral; ‘Mama’ was not the narrator’s biological mother, but instead his
stepmother for two years, when he was aged ten-twelve; she had been a writer, and died
of a heart attack. Mama had been noticeably small and young in appearance, and just
fourteen years older than the narrator; it had made her happy when the narrator called her
‘Mama’ because, she said, ‘it made her feel like a grown-up.’ Mama would tell the
narrator she was writing a novel, but that Papa wasn’t to know because he was ‘a real
artist’ – he had given her a cloisonné pendant he had made, and she wore it always. The
narrator recalls that Mama talked to herself when she was alone ‘all the time’ and, when
she read to the narrator, ‘Eventually, she started to slur her words, and her voice quivered
so much I worried she was about to cry.’ The narrator then recalls that Mama proposed
an outing to the zoo on a wintry day because she was writing about a zoo in her next
novel and needed to see one. They see all the animals, and Mama comments on the
absurdity of the giraffes’ long necks. Mama had bought them ice cream, despite the cold,
and the narrator recounts the effort they went to to appear to be having a good time, for
Mama’s sake. It is then revealed that her body was discovered by a paper boy: she had
been ‘found with her head resting on her desk, as though she’d been writing something
[…] She apparently has psychological problems brought on by writer’s block. She
thought her work was being plagiarized, or that someone was coming in and taking things
when she was away from home. She made quite a fuss about it, and she apparently started
carrying her manuscripts around tied up in a scarf. Mama was not a particularly
successful writer […] she had won a new writer’s prize. I bought the book and read it. It
was a strange story about an old lady who owns an apartment building and grows carrots
in the courtyard. She digs up one in the shape of a human hand, with five perfect fingers.
In the end, they discover her husband’s body buried in the garden, minus the hands.’
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Later, when the narrator looks through the things Mama had left, they discover an old
newspaper clipping of Mama standing with an emaciated old woman in the courtyard of
an old apartment building, both of them holding hand-shaped carrots. The narrator then,
finally, recalls that Mama had talked to herself more and more towards the end, even
when she was not alone, and that she had stopped wearing the pendant Papa had made for
her.
‘Lab Coats’ finds a different first-person narrator working in a hospital with a
fellow secretary, sorting dirty lab coats for the laundry. The narrator is infatuated with the
other secretary, and ignores her faults: she only talks about herself; she purposefully
blames the narrator for a mistake in a presentation, despite it being her error stating the
colour code 508 instead of 608; and the fact that her boyfriend is a resident doctor from
Respiratory Medicine, who is married with children. One evening, as they are once again
sorting dirty lab coats, she is complaining that the doctor still hasn’t told his wife that he
is going to leave her, that he always has some excuse for not having told her, and that
now his wife has fallen pregnant (presumably as part of her ‘evil scheme’). She then
reveals that she couldn’t bear the waiting any longer, and had killed him; the narrator
finds a tongue in the pocket of one of the lab coats from Respiratory Medicine.
Next, in ‘Sewing for the Heart’, the first-person narrator immediately walks into a
hospital to the sound of the PA system repeatedly calling for Dr. Y from Respiratory
Medicine, whom, the narrator discovers, hasn’t been seen all morning. Unperturbed, the
narrator continues to their destination: the cardiac ward. The narrator explains that they
are a bag maker, and that they live a boring, simple life, other than the excitement they
reserve for bags: ‘my heart beats uncontrollably and I feel as though my hands wield all
the powers of the universe.’ They are proud that they can make any kind of bag,
including the request they subsequently receive to make a bag to contain the human heart
of a woman who was born with her heart outside her chest. The woman is a singer in a
bar. The narrator goes to every effort to make the bag perfect, neglecting their other
customers and even allowing their hamster to die – they dispose of the hamster in a
rubbish bin at a fast food restaurant. Finally, after a round of adjustments, the bag is
ready, but the woman no longer has any need of it; she has found a surgeon willing to
apply a new technique to put her heart back in place. For the final section of the story, the
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narrator returns the reader to the hospital, where Dr. Y from Respiratory Medicine is still
missing. The narrator is going up to the woman’s room to ask her to try the bag on one
last time so that they know they did their job properly; they have a concealed pair of
shears, and plan to cut the woman’s heart away once it is in the bag.
The first-person narrator of ‘Welcome to the Museum of Torture’ opens the
seventh story by listing an assortment of recent deaths, including a dead hamster they saw
in the rubbish bin of a fast food restaurant that morning. The narrator is a beautician. A
detective attends the narrator’s apartment, and explains a man completing a residency at
the university hospital, who lived in apartment number 508, directly above the narrator,
has been murdered – he has been stabbed so many times in the neck he had nearly been
decapitated. He shows the narrator a photograph of the man, whom the narrator does not
recognise, although the narrator experiences a moment of panic, imagining the
photograph will be of the man post- rather than pre-death, remembering they had been
just about to add crushed tomatoes to their minestrone before the detective arrived. The
detective then asks the narrator if they heard any suspicious noises at about eleven
o’clock, two nights ago, and the narrator describes the sound they had heard of something
heavy being dragged across the floor. Next, the detective explains that a patient has also
been stabbed to death at the hospital, and shows the narrator a photograph of a woman
singing in a bar. To the detective’s disappointment, the narrator doesn’t recognise her
either. Later, the narrator’s boyfriend visits, and the narrator describes, when they curl up
in his arms, their uncanny ability to squeeze into the tiny space he leaves them, legs
folded and shoulders hunched. The narrator describes the murders, and the visit from the
detective and a subsequent reporter, whilst preparing dinner and strawberry shortcake
from the bakery on the plaza, but their boyfriend storms out believing the narrator finds
the murders exciting and amusing. The narrator then also goes out, finding themselves
walking past the bakery where they bought cakes earlier that morning now quiet.
Eventually, they stop outside an old stone building: ‘The Museum of Torture.’ An old
man in a bow tie and with very strong cologne, who is ostensibly the museum’s curator,
greets the narrator and provides a tour, explaining that the house is owned by two elderly
ladies, twins. Partway through the tour, the narrator questions why they are there, and
remembers the strawberry shortcake would be getting stale. The old man then points out
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a piece that was donated to the museum by a bag maker. The narrator wishes to inflict
any number of the torture devices upon their boyfriend, and asks, before they leave, if the
old man wouldn’t mind them returning. He says he’ll be expecting them.
In ‘The Man Who Sold Braces’, the narrator describes how everything their uncle
touches falls apart, and how, after a lifetime of changing jobs, he ended up as the curator
of a strange museum. The narrator receives a call saying his uncle has been killed –
‘crushed under the garbage that had accumulated in his apartment’. The narrator then
explains that his uncle was not a blood relative, but instead ‘the eldest son of [the
narrator’s grandmother’s] new husband and another woman. There was also a large age
difference between my uncle and my mother’. The narrator then describes how his uncle
builds him a model, which subsequently falls apart. Next, his uncle makes braces
designed to make people taller, but they are painful to wear, do not sell, and he is sent to
jail for fraud, having obtained a false license. When they next hear from him, he appears
more prosperous, and smells strongly of cologne. His job, as he describes it, is that of a
butler of a great house owned by two elderly ladies, twins, who had inherited a fortune
from their father, and are interested in many different kinds of torture, and his main job is
to take care of the items they bring home. He also explains how another of his main
responsibilities is to look after the Bengal tiger. Nevertheless, many scandals are
rumoured, including embezzlement of the estate, and indecent involvement with a young
beautician, only eighteen years of age. The narrator recalls the last time they saw their
uncle, when they visited him in his apartment, number 201; there had been so much junk
in the apartment that they’d barely been able to get inside, squeezing past the refrigerator
and over tins of cat food. The sink is filled with empty cologne bottles, and the floor
covered in broken braces and instruments of torture. When the narrator asks after the
tiger, the uncle explains it died in the garden and that ‘It was a beautiful death.’ It begins
to snow outside, and the uncle gives the narrator a coat to keep them warm. But, after the
narrator has left, the coat falls apart, and they realise it is the tiger’s fur, falling to pieces.
Next, ‘The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger’ finds the narrator driving to confront
the woman who had stolen her husband; he had left three days ago to attend a medical
conference (his speciality is Respiratory Medicine, and his mistress is a secretary at the
hospital). The narrator knows this affair has been going on for some time, but has been
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avoiding confronting the issue. As the narrator is driving, they see an accident in which a
driver has been killed, crushed in his lorry cab, and tomatoes have rolled all across the
road. The narrator parks and begins to walk to the apartment, number 508. As they do so,
they recall all the times they have been rejected: being left off lists or out of groups in
school; taking an overdose of sleeping pills, but only ending up sleeping for eighteen
hours, and nobody noticing they had tried to take their own life; yesterday, at the
hairdressers, when she asked the stylist to trim her hair slightly more, and the young girl
had told her she had no business telling her how to do her job. Then the narrator realises
they are lost, but recognises a smell; following it, they find themselves in ‘a beautiful and
meticulously tended garden’. A tiger lays on the ground, with an old man crouched next
to it. The man invites the narrator over. The tiger is sick; he is holding its paw. The smell
the narrator followed is coming from the animal. The tiger begins to drool, and pushes
closer to the old man. He rubs his face against the tiger’s and waits for it to die. After, the
narrator returns to their car and drives home – the road has been cleared of tomatoes.
In Revenge’s penultimate story, ‘Tomatoes and the Full Moon’, the narrator
collects their hotel room key, number 101, only to find a strange woman with a dog in
their room. The woman seems unperturbed, much younger than she first appeared, and
has a bundle wrapped in a scarf tied around her. The woman eventually leaves. The next
day, the narrator sees the woman again, forcing the hotel chef to take a basket of
tomatoes that she said they had grown organically on their farm. The narrator
purposefully avoids the woman. Later, in the restaurant, everything the narrator orders
comes with tomatoes, and the woman reappears with her dog, and sits down at the table.
The woman admits she picked the tomatoes up on the road after a lorry crashed. Then the
woman leaves. The next day, the narrator goes for a tour around the hotel (they are
writing an article about the hotel for a woman’s magazine). They ask when the dolphin
tour starts, but is informed that the dolphins are dead. In the evening, the narrator goes for
a walk and, whilst resting on a bench, the woman appears. Though there is little room on
the bench, the woman manages to squeeze in next to the narrator without difficulty. The
woman says how the narrator looks just like a man who had once saved her life, when she
was lost in a snowstorm almost thirty years ago. She admits that, had she been alone, she
would have happily died, but she didn’t because she had a boy of only ten years of age
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with her; she explains they were on their way home from the zoo, that they had been the
only visitors because of the cold, and that the boy had said the giraffes’ long necks were
absurd. The woman also asks the narrator if they have children, and the narrator says yes
– that their son is ten years old, but that he separated from his wife when their son was
three. A man who looked, the woman reiterates, just like the narrator, came along in a car
and saved them. The next day, the woman watches the narrator swimming in the pool,
and then the narrator takes her photograph in the library for their article. The narrator
asks the woman to put her bundle down for the photos, but the woman says she cannot,
and her dog barks for the first time. The next day, the woman explain the bundle is her
manuscript, a novel that is almost finished, but that she has to keep it with her at all times
because people have been breaking into her house to steal her work. The narrator asks the
woman if the hotel has any of her books in the library; the woman says that they do, and
hands her a book entitled ‘Afternoon at the Bakery’. The narrator notes that the prose is
unremarkable, but that they find themselves wanting to re-read it over and over. Inside
the back cover is a short biography, including a picture of a woman the narrator does not
recognise. The narrator also then takes a photo of their three-year-old son out of their
wallet, just about to blow out the candles on his birthday cake. He would have been
eleven that year, but is dead. The next day, the woman watches the narrator swim again.
When the narrator finishes, and climbs out of the pool, the woman and her dog are gone.
Later, the narrator discovers the woman has checked out, and finds the bundle of their
manuscript on their breakfast table – all the pages are blank.
The final story, ‘Poison Plants’, opens with the narrator explaining that the first
time they met ‘the young man’ was at a charity concert, ‘just as a children’s choir was
beginning an encore of Brahms’s “Little Dustman”’. The narrator is a painter. The young
man wishes to be a composer, and the narrator funds a scholarship for him, which adds
voice, piano and music theory lessons to his studies, as well as allowing him to attend
concerts more regularly. The young man visits the narrator’s house weekly, and notes
they have a piano; the narrator explains that their daughter used to play, but she died
when she was nineteen. The narrator also explains that she is now unable to paint. The
young man plays the piano for the narrator. He would also read aloud – extracts of the
story he reads from the narrator’s library are from ‘Old Mrs. J’. The narrator fantasises
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about being young again, about being able to paint, and about being able to enter into
sexual relations with the young man. He asks what the narrator’s husband had been like.
The narrator says they cannot remember, as his death had been over forty years ago, but
that he was wealthy, much older, and had hired her to paint the poisonous plants in his
garden when the narrator was just nineteen. When the paintings were finished, they had
married. The young man receives a scholarship from the Foundation for Musical Culture,
and returns all the money the narrator had given him for his studies. The narrator goes for
a walk to burn off their grief, but gets lost, loses their cane, and ends up crawling across
unfamiliar ground. They come across a field of discarded refrigerators. They open one of
them, and find someone folded neatly inside. They recognise the body as their own,
having eaten poison plants and died. The narrator ‘wept. For my dead self.’

Interconnectivity
Notable in the above outlined stories is their interconnectivity, which I have attempted to
draw attention to in my summary of each by indicating the relevant details in each story
to best highlight these links. But it is not merely that a single motif pervades all the
stories, or even most of the stories, and instead that tiny, interconnected details make
each story feel like the delicate, interwoven roots of a tree.
But why is this so effective? What is its specific impact on the reader?
To draw on but a few initial examples from Revenge, firstly, the writer pays clear
attention to specific numbers – 508 and 608, and 101 and 201, being linked together
through colour codes, apartment numbers, and hotel room numbers relevant to different
characters and stories. On the surface, this connection might seem simplistic – nothing
more complex than merely repeating a sequence of numbers to indicate some kind of link
or continuity between various stories and characters. However, this is so effective,
despite its apparent simplicity, because of what the numbers themselves represent: rented
apartments and hotel rooms are places of transition, points of departure, spaces through
which characters (and by extension people) move and live. Therefore, it is not just some
arbitrary link between stories, inserted in an effort to make them seem conjoined, but
instead it speaks to the roving nature of the entire set of stories; each carries the reader to
and fro, back and forth, between places and people, in the same way that the human
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experience is one of to and fro, back and forth. By doing this, the writer is perhaps
highlighting the transitory nature of people’s lives for the reader – brief and fleeting and
changeable – which is reflected too by the genre itself; each story is also transitory,
reflecting snapshots of infinitely larger and more complex lives, threaded together
through connections that humans divine for themselves – in the real world, such numbers
would have been entirely random, but in this world of prose the writer guides the reader
through their use of such specifically chosen connections. Tim O’Brien (2009) achieves
something akin to this with his composite novel (O’Gorman, 1998, pp. 289-309) The
Things They Carried; it is, of course, only natural that real world soldiers carry a whole
host of ‘things’, both physical and abstract, but, like Ogawa, it is in the way O’Brien knits
these ‘things’ together into various, interconnected narratives that impact the reader,
offering greater meaning. Similarly, Jon McGregor’s (2006) So Many Ways to Begin
presents the reader with specific items from a museum collection, through which the
narrative is told – again, items often come to museums by chance, and certainly not by
design, but McGregor’s are specifically chosen (letters, postcards, birth certificates), in
much the same way as the objects in Ogawa’s ‘Museum of Torture’, to have specific
impacts on the reader, allowing individual interpretations of their significance.
Additionally, Ogawa draws upon another simplistic device – that of the sense of
smell. At several points throughout several of Revenge’s stories, characters are attracted
by, or the reader’s attention is drawn to, specific smells: that of the museum curator’s
cologne; and the smell of ‘fern’, which seems to also be the smell of the tiger. Of course,
sensory details are a useful tool in prose writing, affording the reader a more visceral
understanding of setting, as well as instilling a scene with immediacy. However, again, I
believe Ogawa is achieving so much more than that with Revenge. Smells can often relate
strongly to memory, which at first seems like an obvious connection to draw, but Ogawa
perhaps takes this one step further; the writer uses these smells – which often the
characters do not quite recognise, yet draw them on nonetheless, or which other
characters use to conceal the truth (such as is the case with the museum curator’s
cologne) – to draw the reader’s attention to misremembered details, or concealed truths.
For example, the narrator of ‘The Little Dustman’ recalls how, when Mama took him to
the zoo when he was ten-years-old, she commented on the absurdity of the giraffes’ long
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necks, but then the narrator of ‘Tomatoes and the Full Moon’ recollects how the strange
woman (who is, presumably, Mama) tells them of a visit to the zoo during which the ten-
year-old she was with said the giraffes’ necks were absurd. It is perhaps in these tiny,
interconnected details that we unravel why Revenge is so effective: they indicate to the
reader, extremely subtly, the inconsistencies of life; how humans are ruled by
misremembering; how life is, quite simply, perhaps not the way we want it to be; how
that is, undoubtedly, part of the nature of the human condition. Colum McCann (2015)
achieves something similar with Thirteen Ways of Looking: no one point of view can
provide the full picture, and without fake, false, incomplete, or self-doctored memories,
there would indeed be no story of interest for the reader. It is through writers’ decisions
to harness these opposing and incomplete points of view that the genre draws one of its
greatest strengths – again, its ability to snapshot specific moments, incidents, memories,
objects, etc, and instil them with a wide array of meaning, free for the reader’s
interpretation.
Furthermore, Ogawa offers physical manifestations of this complexity through the
stories’ characters – in the simplest terms, it is left to the reader to piece together who
everyone is, knowing each character connects to every other character and story in some
way, but not always immediately sure of how or where. This is, of course, engaging, and
makes reading these stories more interesting, but I do not believe that is the sole reason
for Ogawa’s employment of this technique. One clear example and allusion of this can be
found in ‘The Man Who Sold Braces’: ‘We thought of him as my mothers’ older brother,
but he came into the family at the time of my grandmother’s second marriage and was
actually the eldest son of her new husband and another woman.’ The effect on the reader
here, I would suggest, is that the complexity of these relationships mirrors the complexity
of life; no matter how we try to organise and categorise it, it is never going to be neat and
easy and simple. But that alone isn’t why Revenge’s physical manifestations of
complexity are so effective – merely saying ‘these fictional relationships are complex,
because real relationships can be complex’ would be far too simple. The very genre itself,
and its form, also reflect that complexity. It is not linear, nor straightforward, in the way
that many readers (accurately or not) might have come to think of novels; nor is there a
clear, singular character arc that crosses all eleven stories; both of these elements can be
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found in other examples of the genre, such as Rachel Cusk’s (2006) Arlington Park,
where, despite initial divergence, characters converge at the end of the story in something
of a climax/finale. Revenge does not follow this structure, as is further discussed later,
and the repeated use of the first-person narrator, combined with the sometimes
overwhelming and confusing complexity of different characters’ relationships to different
stories, can give the impression that there is overlap between them. This is, I believe,
purposefully challenging for the reader, representing Lister’s (2007) aforementioned
‘plurality and openness’, contesting ’boundaries’, and enacting ‘the possibility of
multiple beginnings and renewable identities’. Chuck Palahniuk’s (2005) Haunted also
addresses this complexity of human relationships, albeit utilising slightly different
techniques, including a wider variety of perspectives: the prologue is told in the first-
person plural perspective, and immediately acknowledges that the characters’ lives have
already intersected in time and space. From thereon, the characters’ complex
relationships evolve and grow and change in the main narrative, whilst simultaneously
the reader learns more about each character’s past in side narratives. Whilst interesting, I
believe this offers a less effective representation of the complexity of the human
experience than Revenge, because the reader is given so much more breathing space as
the narrative, overall, unfolds in a much more linear fashion.
In addition, in the above outlined stories, I have also purposefully, where possible,
refrained from referring to each narrator by any specific gender; in some stories there are
strong indications that the narrator is of one gender or another, whilst in others it is much
less clear. Again, I interpret this as another layer of complexity that Ogawa employs
through her singular use of the first-person perspective throughout Revenge; whilst that
decision not to vary the stories’ perspectives might at first seem to provide greater
simplicity, I believe that, actually, the opposite is true. It perhaps means that, especially
as the stories progress, and the relationships become evermore complex and entwined,
that the reader becomes more invested and engrossed, since they, to all extents and
purposes, become each character for the duration of a story – though they might not even
be sure, initially at least, who their character is, and must work harder to understand who
their narrator is in each story.
The level of complexity that Revenge displays can be quite overwhelming, even
Ross Turner

alienating, for the reader, and perhaps this is one of the reasons that, as previously
discussed, the short story cycle has remained ‘unrecognised’, ‘overlooked’, and
‘misunderstood’ (Nagel, 2001, pp. 1-17). It is one thing to capture ‘elemental truths about
modernity’ (Smith, 2018, pp. 1-2), and quite another to present those incredibly complex
truths in an easy, mass-marketable way.

Circularity: From ‘Afternoon at the Bakery’ to ‘Poison Plants’ and Back Again
Yes, Revenge provides complex and sustained interconnectivity, engrossing the reader
within a hundred different elements of character and setting, but it also offers something
that many other equivalent works in the genre do not: circularity. Short stories can be
very satisfying when they are circular, bringing the reader back around to where they
began (or at least an element or shadow of it) in a way that feels complete. And, whilst
other aforementioned works in this genre (The Things They Carried, Thirteen Ways of
Looking, Haunted, Arlington Park, etc) provide excellent equivalences, one thing they do
not provide is complete circularity for the entire, collected work: the war comes to an end
and soldiers are no longer needed; the event concludes; the entrapped characters either
die or are, hopefully, rescued; the characters converge and dinner occurs, etc. Revenge,
on the other hand, does achieve this and is therefore, perhaps, a true short story cycle,
because it is truly cyclical. Maybe the best way to discuss this is by laying elements of
Revenge’s first and last stories, ‘Afternoon at the Bakery’ and ‘Poison Plants’, out in
parallel with each other.
‘Afternoon at the Bakery’ is striking in many ways, but perhaps more so than
anywhere else at the beginning of the third section on page 4: ‘He died twelve years ago.
Suffocated in an abandoned refrigerator in an abandoned lot.’ This is so effective that
when, 158 pages later, in ‘Poison Plants’, the narrator ‘reached out to touch the nearest
one: a refrigerator’, it isn’t simply that the reader knows what is coming, but instead that
they are catapulted back to the beginning of the entire cycle. Ogawa utilises the impact of
this specifically through her manipulation of the reader’s expectations; the title of the
opening story alone, ‘Afternoon at the Bakery’, has undeniably positive connotations,
which are immediately upended when the reader discovers how the narrator’s son died.
Then, by the time the reader reaches the final story, and the narrator discovers the boy in
Ross Turner

the refrigerator, the reader has already experienced their shock, and are now cycling back
around to it again. It wouldn’t be enough for Ogawa to simply ensure the reader knows
what to expect; instead, to achieve true circularity, the reader must envisage the stories
bending until, as a whole, they are entirely circular, and ‘Afternoon at the Bakery’ is not
just the first story, but also the twelfth, and the twenty-third, and the thirty-fourth, etc. In
this way, Revenge becomes not only circular, but infinite. And, considering the
previously discussed ways Revenge taps into our understanding of the human condition,
perhaps it is suggesting for the reader that this too is infinite, unsolvable. This is so
effective because we have not yet produced (and are, I imagine, unlikely to produce) a
satisfactory answer for what it means to be human, and this genre, down to its very form,
perhaps encapsulates that desire, that pursuit, in the perfect way for the reader.
Ross Turner

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