Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales
By Yoko Ogawa
(Picador)

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow has some company in Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa, whose “Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales” is a storehouse of creepy and vicious behavior from otherwise normal-seeming people.

In her books that have been translated into English so far, Ogawa has shown a propensity for characters in the grip of obsessions, be they the benign mathematical fixation of the brain-injured scholar in “The Professor and the Housekeeper,” or the icky sexual preoccupations of a teenager and her older lover in “Hotel Iris.”

Some of the obsessions portrayed in the stories of “Revenge,” first published in Japan in 1998, come from anger or resentment at partners or family. The title character of “Old Mrs. J,” a surprisingly strong octogenarian, burns with contempt for her “lousy drunk” of a husband. The nurse in “Lab Coats” plans to kill her lover, a surgeon, if he doesn’t leave his wife.

Ogawa keeps the gore, and often the crimes themselves, offstage, focusing on the mental state of the narrators, as the tales morph from their quotidian openings to the drama of their final shocks. Their touches of horror sometimes put me in mind of the grown-up stories of Roald Dahl, who also loved to write about ordinary people doing awful things.

Fiendishly, Ogawa has also made the stories interlocking. A college student enters a building filled with kiwis in “Fruit Juice”; the landlady in “Old Mrs. J.” grows those kiwis on her property. When a bag maker’s hamster dies in “Sewing for the Heart,” he slips the dead animal into a fast-food restaurant’s trash bin. A woman sees that hamster’s body in “Welcome to the Museum of Torture.”

In “Sewing for the Heart,” one of the collection’s pivotal tales and certainly its creepiest, the bag maker is commissioned by a singer to make a bag to hold her heart. She was born with it outside her chest. The craftsman first considers the practical challenge of the commission: “‘I think seal skin would be ideal. ... It’s soft and strong, and it repels moisture while providing superior insulation.’”

But then it occurs to him “that I would have to see her exposed heart at some point in the process ― a prospect that disturbed me. I had never seen a human heart before, and the thought filled me with fear and disgust.”

He works intensely on the commission, and becomes preoccupied with the singer. When an abrupt change of plans affects his work, you just know he isn’t going to go away quietly.

In “Welcome to the Museum of Torture,” a young woman tells her boyfriend about being interviewed by a detective regarding a murder upstairs in her apartment building, and about a murder in the hospital. Weirded out by her excited chatter, the boyfriend walks out. She goes for a long walk, winding up at the Museum of Torture. “Just the spot for me right now,” she thinks.

An old man guides her through the museum, explaining each implement of pain in enthusiastic detail.

Two old maiden ladies, twin sisters, traveled around the world collecting them, he tells the young visitor.

“‘But what did they want with all this?’” she asks him.

“‘The desires of the human heart know no reason or rules,’” he tells her. “‘I suppose I might ask you instead what you hope to discover by coming to see us today?’”

At the end of the tour, she asks him, “‘Do you ever get the urge to try out some of the things you’ve got here?’

“‘Of course I do,’ he said at last. His smile had disappeared. ‘In fact, I don’t exhibit an object unless I have the desire to use it.’”

At the end of ”Revenge,“ Ogawa’s readers may not quite have the desire, say, to strangle an offending husband and bury him in the garden, but they’ll certainly wonder a little more about the state of the mind of the person standing next to them in the line at the bakery. 

(MCT)