Pieces of (in)human depravity: Revenge by Ogawa Yōko

If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you , wrote Nietzsche.

Ogawa Yōko seems to have made the German philosopher's maxim her own, penning eleven sort stories where a diabolical providence sets the stage. Vendetta, edited by Il Saggiatore, employs a crude and direct style to lead the reader into an exploration of the pain encased in a sense of anguish, torment and depravity.

The first few pages frame an array of disturbing tales, populated by bizarre characters: an aspiring writer moves into an apartment where the landlady cultivates five-fingered greens in the garden where she hid her husband's corpse; a brutally murdered surgeon and a singer with a malformed chest, who becomes the obsession of a bag maker who intends to enshrine that monstrous heart within his greatest creation; a mysterious old man and his Bengal tiger, last custodians of an abandoned villa turned into a torture museum.

Reality is shattered into dark, distorted, macabre pieces with no chance of return: destinies converge upon apparently innocent items - a cake, fridges, aprons, tweezers and bags of tomatoes – that become, instead, accomplices of our descent into the twisted core of the human spirit.

A violence that fascinates, tearing through flesh and conscience through the frame of revenge rather than death, as the original title suggests: Kamokuna Shigai, Midarana Tomurai 寡黙な死骸 みだらな弔い, literally 'Reticent corpse, indecent funeral'.

When would death come? I waited, still. I could feel a smell that made me long for something. The same smell from when I found my son: wet, mysterious, slightly sweet.

Ogawa Yōko, with surgical precision, dissects every single aspect of humanity's dark side, detailing characters in their actions that, often unknowingly, precipitate them and others toward ruin. A single read is not enough to fully catch all references and enigmas hidden throughout the book: like a mysterious cave painting, Ogawa attempts to read in the shadows' depths, leaving the reader with the tools necessary to create their own stories and explore their own dark side – all this with an innocence and purity of form that is antithetical to the perversion and depravity of the book's content.

When a dog this big dies, what are you supposed to do?” said the boy, asking no one... […] lately, I've been wondering if writing a novel is, rather than writing words on a cave's surface, more like reading such words. If I could read the words that are already there, maybe I could ave told the boy what would happen after the dog's death.

Yōko Ogawa, Revenge (translation by Laura Testaverde) Il Saggiatore, Milano 2014 

 

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