Revenge

Yoko Ogawa's Revenge is like a plump cream cake with a ticking bomb concealed inside: a collection of deliciously perverse, exquisitely cruel stories that lull you into complacency, all prettiness and ponies and fluttering eyelashes, and then turn around and deliver a flying kick to the gut.

In a way, Ogawa is a bit like the lovechild of Haruki Murakami and Stephen King, if you can imagine such a thing. She describes humdrum small-town lives in a blank, unaffected prose that dares you to look for the undercurrents beneath its placid surface. But where Murakami's surprises are of the deeply weird, numinous, achy-breaky-existential-heart variety, Ogawa's payload is more often than not a dose of breathtaking, vertiginous horror.

A child suffocates in a refrigerator, a murder victim has her heart cut out with a pair of scissors, a hairdresser dreams of inflicting exquisite tortures upon her lover. As with all great horror stories, though, the real punch isn't in the banal details of gore and disememberment: it's in the terrible, icy calm of the storyteller. Ogawa's narrators are always still, cool, quietly curious about what is happening to them, with the banal detachment of the terribly traumatised or the utterly mad. The devil is in the details: when a lorry turns over on the road and the driver is crushed to death, our attention is directed away from the driver's mangled body and focused instead on the tomatoes spilled out across the road, fat and red and juicy in the sunshine. You read this story, and you go into the kitchen, and you find you don't feel quite the same way about tomatoes any more.