In Other Words
Elizabeth Flux on Yōko Ogawa
There’s something that happens every time I’m in a large, people-filled space. An airport. A convention hall. A shopping centre. I watch the strangers going about their business—the man leafing through a magazine; the woman hunched up on a bench frowning at her phone; the families ignoring each other; the barista mechanically shrinking an empty milk carton with steam—and find myself thinking, everyone here is a protagonist. Then, before I get overwhelmed by the idea that the stories contained within each individual person should take up far more space than is available, another thought follows: statistically, there’s probably a murderer here.
If this sounds like something I made up for a good lede, I wish it were. I don’t think I’m a particularly macabre person—I’m just someone who looks at the statistics around serial killers, and thinks, yeah, but these are just the ones we know about. I’m someone who wants to know what a mirror would look like if it weren’t reflecting anything, or how many books are still going to be unread on my shelf on the day that I die, or exactly why is it that some people think in pictures, some in words, some in in a way that sits in-between, and some can’t explain how they think at all? It’s just, I often feel consumed by the gaps in our experience, the things we don’t know, and the things we can never see.
✷
Every so often a book comes along that recalibrates your bar for what is good and what is competent, and for me the most recent example is Revenge by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder. The book speaks to me for two reasons: firstly, it’s a perfect collection, filled with dark and surreal stories; secondly, the fact that it is a translated work hints to an undercurrent of fiction in the world, of ideas, that I as a reader will never have access to.
The eleven stories that make up Revenge are connected in strange ways. Fruit disappears from one and appears in another—which is then explained in a throwaway comment in a later story. Characters move from the background into the foreground. We meet people at different stages of their lives but often don’t realise who they are until events have played out. Two stories show the same memory from two different sides, with each narrator remembering who said what differently. In ‘The Little Dustman’, a man is recalling a trip he took to the zoo with his stepmother as a child.
“Why do you suppose giraffes have such long necks?” Mama said, brushing the snow from the railing in front of the cage.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It seems absurd, doesn’t it?” I nodded vaguely, not quite sure what ‘absurd’ meant.
Later in the book, ‘Tomatoes and the Full Moon’ seems like an unrelated story, before it is revealed that one of the characters is in fact the stepmother, now an old woman. She is telling a stranger about the same trip to the zoo:
“He asked me why the giraffe’s neck was so long. He said it was ‘absurd.’ How did a ten-year-old child know a word like ‘absurd’?”
It's a small detail – these are throwaway stories within bigger stories, but each remembers the conversation flipped around, and the truth is impossible to know. One of the characters has lost their grasp on who they are in their own memory, but which one of them is it? Their two different accounts create a dissonance that is, for the reader, at once both irritating and refreshing, and serving as a reminder of the fragility and subjectivity of memory. Once a moment has passed, certainty and truth goes with it.
I call Revenge a perfect collection because it is not a novel pretending to be different stories, nor a grouping of excellent stories connected only through their author. It is comprised of interlocking stories that both stand alone and yet connect with their neighbours; they all nod to one another; they belong together. There is murder, death, obsession, and a Bengal Tiger. There’s a vegetable garden that grows carrots that look like hands. Revenge moves from the mundane to the macabre to the magical without ever shifting tone—Ogawa has a restrained way of writing that makes even the most surreal or violent or creepy ideas and images seem matter-of-fact. Not for a moment does it seem ridiculous or implausible that a room would be filled with kiwi fruit, or that a woman would be shopping for a custom-made bag to house the heart that lives outside of her body.
Ogawa introduces a meta element to the collection. Somehow, the book we are reading, or at least parts of it, exists within itself. Revenge starts with a story titled ‘Afternoon at the Bakery’. In the penultimate story, ‘Tomatoes and the Full Moon’, Ogawa has her protagonist both compliment this first story, and tear it to pieces:
Later, in my room, I read ‘Afternoon at the Bakery’. It was about a woman who goes to buy a birthday cake for her dead son. That was the whole story. I should have gone back to my article, but I read her novel through twice, finishing for the second time at 3:00 a.m. The prose was unremarkable, as were the plot and characters, but there was an icy current running under her words, and I found myself wanting to plunge into it again and again.
In the final story, ‘Poison Plants’, a character plucks a book off a shelf and starts reading aloud, the lines taken from ‘Old Mrs J’, an earlier story. Ogawa’s continual references to the book within the book seem so small yet are so persistent that they make you want to buy a pinboard and a skein of red wool before locking yourself away in a quiet room until you figure out exactly what is going on.
Ogawa also weaves in a writer character, who is paranoid that her works are being stolen and published by another woman:
That hunchback woman with the glasses published a novel exactly like the one I’d been writing. The same plot, same characters, even the same title. Isn’t that the most horrible thing you’ve ever heard?
On reading this the first time I immediately put down the book and scoured the internet for pictures of the Ogawa. There she is, again and again, glasses-free with impeccable posture. But then if she is the one truly writing these words, is she in this book too? She can’t possibly be the woman paranoid that her words are being stolen—the plot, without offering up spoilers, rules this out. But she also can’t be the woman accused of stealing them. It’s a trap in fiction to constantly try and figure where the author has written themselves in to the story—but in this case Ogawa has opened up a door and it’s hard to figure out why. In doing this, she brings the world of Revenge both closer and further away from our own reality.
These small moments that overlap and feed one another mean the book is not really finished until read a second time, intricacies fitting together only on a second or third read.
✷
All of Ogawa’s works that I’ve read have been translated into English by Stephen Snyder. These three – The Memory Police (published in Japanese in 1994, translated into English in 2019), Revenge (published in Japanese in 1998, translated into English in 2013), and The Housekeeper and the Professor (published in Japanese in 2003, translated into English in 2009) overlap in their interests and concerns. Memory—its importance, its fallibility—is something she comes back to again and again, picking it apart from different angles. It makes sense for her stories all to be filtered through the same mind; it means that her voice will stay consistent, that they’re being told by someone who is familiar with her writing and who gets what she is doing. It’s not just about translating the words literally—in order to do justice to the underlying work a translator needs to know not only the language but the cultural context and author’s intent. There are gaps between words and what they mean. I experience this every time I watch a Cantonese language film and read the English subtitles. Often there are moments where what is literally said is not what is spelled out in white at the bottom, and yet the true meaning, the intent of what is said is conveyed—and that is more important. There’s a Cantonese phrase lei seung sei ah? There are a lot of situations where you might use it—your significant other deliberately puts on a song you hate; you see a friend picking up salt instead of sugar to put in their tea; your neighbour suggests you eat this carrot that looks like a dead man’s hand. Its meaning is roughly akin to ‘are you serious right now?’ Literally translated, however, it’s ‘do you want to die?’. Not quite the same effect.
In Ogawa’s bio, tucked into the back of the book, it bluntly and impressively states that she has won every major Japanese literary award. This is why we get to see her work—but even then, we aren’t seeing all of it. Presumably only writing expected to sell will be translated, which means that anything truly different or difficult will remain out of reach. A translated work means only that this book can break through—that it has a chance in a foreign market. But every translated work we get hints at everything else we are not seeing. And, of course, this all becomes self-fulfilling. If we read the same things then we want the same things. If we don’t know what we’re missing, we don’t know what to ask for.
In Ogawa’s The Memory Police, the residents of a small island start to forget things. The things themselves still exist, but now they just don’t make sense. People wake up and suddenly will have no recollection or attachment to something they once held on to tightly. Maybe one day it’s something small, the taste of a specific food reduced to nothing. But on another day, personal photographs are suddenly rendered meaningless. Ogawa layers small tragedy upon small tragedy, made all the more grim because the residents can’t feel what it is they are losing.
There are stories out there we don’t know we’ll love and I think it’s a tragedy. It keeps our worlds small.
✷
All of this comes back to the gaps in our experience. Earlier this year I read about a woman who is a “super-recogniser”—someone who can recall every face she’s ever seen. When she was young, she would see people at the shops, on the street, just out and about, and tell her mother that she recognised them, that she’d seen them before. Of course there are strangers who repeatedly pass through the background of our lives without us ever knowing it, but the idea of being able to piece together a narrative for them, to get a bit more insight into their lives, is hypnotic. We are fascinated by stories and lives intersecting. It’s why whenever there’s a disaster—a plane crash, an extreme weather event—the I was almost there and what if stories flood in. It’s why we’re captivated by anecdotes, like that of a married couple who ended up in a photograph together, years before they met—just a background stranger, now the love of her life. As a child I pored over Readers Digest’s Mysteries of the Unexplained, reading it over and over until the stories wore new pathways in my brain. In it there is a large section on coincidences—which includes the story of an artist whose suicide attempts were thwarted twice, years apart, by the same monk. A stranger. On his third attempt, the artist succeeded in ending his own life. His funeral, through another twist of fate, was conducted by the monk. The unlikely intersection of lives is a seductive area to think on.
Revenge captures this feeling and puts it onto the page. The woman crying on the phone in the bakery is a stranger only for a little while. The man who leads tours of a museum dedicated to torture isn’t just a quirky character bulking out a story. We already know everyone is at the centre of an entire universe, but Ogawa shows us how the world is constantly thrumming with stories that overlap or just miss one another.
Here I go with my own meta technique—by giving us a glimpse into the internal lives of strangers, the stories in Revenge fill in what would otherwise be gaps. But the book itself also fills a gap—while exposing many others that we might not have known were there. The world is filled with so many different kinds of stories, of ideas, and we’ll only ever see some of them.
It is deeply depressing that we keep remaking the same films over and over again, adapting the same books, endless reiterations with new and improved CGI explosions or intricate anachronisms. How many times does Hollywood need to gather the four most popular young actresses and once more trot out Little Women?
It’s a similar situation in books. There are great stories being written all the time. There are also far too many novels where the plot is sad beautiful woman has sad ugly sex or I have returned to my hometown and it is awkward. Yes there are well-written variations of this – there are always exceptions. But I am just so tired of, time and time again, seeing the same book trotted out but ‘now with new hat!’ There is—forgive me—a whole world of books out there that we could be looking at. I am sick of the new hat. We deserve new worlds.
There’s an old Chinese story about a frog that lives at the bottom of a well. Having lived his whole life in one place, he believes that the whole world is made up of the circle of sky he can see. When a bird comes to visit and tells him about mountains and hills and rivers and other animals the frog simply can’t and doesn’t accept this. Seeing is believing. If something is outside of our experience, it can be hard or even impossible to believe.
He decides to stay in the well, content with what he already knows. Anyway, if that bird hadn’t flown past, what impetus would he have had to even think that there were things beyond his own experience?
Part of me hates knowing that there are so many things I don’t know. That there are colours in between the ones we can perceive, and can never imagine. That—and this is a comment that gets me weird looks at parties—that if alien life does exist, we could be seeing it and not know because they could be huge or tiny or in a form that we don’t recognise as a lifeform. Maybe the bird has told me too much, but books like Revenge are a gift. Ogawa shows that stories can push against expectations and form, that strangeness can be revelled in and embraced—and that the world doesn’t need to be so small.
✷✷✷
Works Cited
✷ Benjamin Haas, ‘Married couple discover photo of them both from 11 years before they met’, The Guardian, 14 March 2018.
✷ Bronwyn Adcock, ‘I’d keep it on the down low’: the secret life of a super-recogniser’, The Guardian, 16 January 2022.
✷ Reader’s Digest, Mysteries of the Unexplained. (Hong Kong: 1982).
✷ Yōko Ogawa, Revenge, translated by Stephen Snyder (Great Britain: Vintage, 2013).
✷ Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police, translated by Stephen Snyder (Great Britain: Harville Secker, 2019).
Elizabeth Flux is an award-winning writer, editor-at-large for the Melbourne City of Literature office, and the editor of The Victorian Writer. In 2019 and 2020 she was a convening judge for the VPLAs. Her fiction and nonfiction work has been widely published.