Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales

by Yōko Ogawa

Then one day I realized that all the kiwis had disappeared from one section of the orchard, though I had seen no one picking them.

“A carrot,” she said, holding it up with obvious pride. “But what a strange shape,” I said, pausing over the potatoes. It was indeed odd: a carrot in the shape of a hand. It was plump, like a baby’s hand, and perfectly formed: five fingers, with a thick thumb and a longer finger in the middle. The greens looked like a scrap of lace decorating the wrist.

The hands were missing from the corpse, and they never turned up, even after the whole garden had been searched.

My biological mother had died shortly after giving birth to me. She had scratched a pimple inside her nose and it had become infected.

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. That was the general idea.

Of all the jobs we secretaries at the hospital have to do, this is the one we hate the most. Partly because it’s nasty and boring, but also because the laundry room is next to the morgue.

To be honest, the morgue doesn’t scare me much. I don’t really understand why the other girls are so afraid of it. They see people dying all over the hospital, while they type their reports or eat cream puffs in the lounge. The job is even kind of nice, especially when she’s next to me. She’s as beautiful underground as she is in the office, her face all white and pale.

I never said a word of what happened, not to anyone. I was willing to be color-blind if it would keep her perfect.

“How could he be so cruel? How could he tell me to wait? No, I couldn’t wait any longer. Not one more day, not one more second.”

“That’s why I killed him,” she says. Her voice is low and cold. I feel a scream rising out of me, but somehow I stop it, hold it back, and instead I calmly imagine the scene: the knife in her pretty hand; the blade slicing into him again and again; skin ripping, blood spurting. But she’s spotless. I pick up the next coat. “Respiratory Medicine, one long.” It’s his. I shake it and out falls a tongue. It’s still soft. Maybe even warm.

So then, in the evenings, when I’ve finished my dinner, I sit on the couch by the window and drink a cup of Chinese tea. I turn off the lamp in the room and look down on the street below. The passersby are cast in a seductive shadow. People drift by under my window—strolling couples, men returning late from the office, women from the bars, drunks—and all of them are carrying bags. Here’s a filthy one with two long scratches on the side. That puffy one seems to mimic the face of its owner. That one’s cracked and faded, as though it was left out in the rain. In the moonlight I see these details, savor them for a few seconds as they pass below my window.

I was shocked to see the heart beating—for some reason, I had imagined it would be inanimate. But there it was, pulsing and contracting. It seemed to cringe under my gaze. Then there was the blood flowing in the vessels. It was clear, not red, pumping through the fine veins and arteries and then disappearing into her body.

It seemed odd to be looking at a woman’s breast but feeling no desire to touch it, or to take the nipple between my lips. Instead, I found myself longing to caress her heart.

The beauty of the heart oppressed me, but my hands were steady as I worked. I had managed to make a thing that no one else could have made.

But it wasn’t just humans. I saw a dead hamster in the garbage can at a fast-food place this morning.

Why was everyone dying? They had all been so alive just yesterday.

A man was murdered in the apartment directly above mine, in number 508. He was apparently doing a residency at the university hospital. He was stabbed more than a dozen times in the neck. They say he was nearly decapitated.

“By the way, a patient at the university hospital was stabbed to death the other day as well. We’re trying to figure out whether there’s any connection between the two incidents. Would you know anything at all about that?” He took a second photograph from his pocket.

“For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls, drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they literally explode, and every sensation in the body is absorbed into that one spot on the forehead—indeed, you come to feel that you are nothing but a forehead, into which a fine needle is being forced millimeter by millimeter. You can’t sleep or even speak, hypnotized by a suffering that is greater than any mere pain. In general, the victim goes mad before a day has passed.”

He described these “devices” one after the other, and I found it difficult to picture what they looked like. Some of them, though, reminded me of that brace of his.

“Even if something seems pointless at the time, you mustn’t take it lightly. You’ll see how useful it is later on. Nothing you study will ever turn out to be useless. That’s the way the world is.”

The fur shimmered in the white snow as I knelt to gather up the scattered bits of the tiger.

What was I going to do when I saw her? It was a question I had asked myself a thousand times. Slap her? Scream insults? Demand she give my husband back?

As I walked, I recalled, one by one, all the times I had ever been rejected. This process had become something of a ritual with me since my husband’s affair had started. I would unearth memories, beginning in childhood, of places and occasions when someone had hurt me. In that way, I believed, I would see that my pain was due not only to my husband but to the cruelty of countless others besides. I found it somehow comforting to think that his coldness was in no way special or unique.

At fifteen, I took an overdose of sleeping pills. I must have had a good reason for wanting to kill myself, but I’ve forgotten what it was. Perhaps I was just fed up with everything. At any rate, I slept for eighteen hours straight, and when I woke up I was completely refreshed. My body felt so empty and purified that I wondered whether I had, in fact, died. But no one in my family even seemed to have noticed I had attempted suicide.

“There now,” the man repeated, wrapping his arms around the tiger’s neck and rubbing his cheek against its face.

“It was warm in the car despite the snow,” she said, continuing her story as though she had paused only for a moment. “The seats were soft; music was playing on the radio. It was as if we had suddenly entered another world.”

“I haven’t seen him since he was twelve,” she said, tugging at the knot on her bundle. The silk was soiled and fraying in places from being carried about so much. “He wasn’t really my son,” she added. “He was my husband’s child from a previous marriage. I’ve never had children of my own.”

“What do you have in your bundle? It must be something very important.” “A manuscript,” she said, gathering it up in her arms again.

My chest began to ache and cold sweat ran down my back. My foot caught on something and I stumbled again, managing to catch myself on a large, double-door stainless refrigerator, the kind from a restaurant kitchen. It was spattered here and there with bird droppings. I opened the doors—and I found someone inside. Legs neatly folded, head buried between the knees, curled ingeniously to fit between the shelves and the egg box. “Excuse me,” I said, but my voice seemed to disappear into the dark. It was my body. In this gloomy, cramped box, I had eaten poison plants and died, hidden away from prying eyes. Crouching down at the door, I wept. For my dead self.