Revenge (16 page)

Not knowing which way to go, I chose a direction at random and set off. There were no maps of the area or arrows pointing the way. From time to time, a bird flew up from the bushes. The cuts on my hands were still painful, and my skirt was speckled with twigs and leaves and dead insects.

I had thought I was heading downhill, but the path started to rise again quite steeply. Still, I was reluctant to turn back.

“Lean on me.” I thought I heard his voice, but I did not look around. He had not appeared for our next appointment. Instead I received a letter along with all the money I had given him for his studies:

“… happy to inform you that I have obtained a scholarship from the Foundation for Musical Culture … and fully realizing your generous support could benefit someone with greater need … hereby return to you … with my most sincere thanks…” The tone was polite, but terribly cold.

I lost my cane as I was crawling up the hill. Bracing my foot on the roots of a tree, I took hold of a branch and barely managed to pull myself over the lip of a small ridge. The blood was clotting on my hands.

Then I found myself at the edge of an open field that sloped gently above me—a field covered with boxlike objects. I reached out to touch the nearest one: a refrigerator. Broken refrigerators—some upended, others half crushed, white ones, blue, yellow, big ones, tiny ones, some missing doors, some scrawled with graffiti—every refrigerator imaginable.

I wove my way through them, noting all the different ways in which they had been damaged, ruined beyond repair. The silence was oppressive.

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.

A
LSO BY
Y
OKO
O
GAWA

The Diving Pool

The Housekeeper and the Professor

Hotel Iris

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Yoko Ogawa’s fiction has appeared in
The New Yorker, A Public Space,
and
Harper’s Magazine
. Since 1988, she has produced more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. Her novel
Hotel Iris
was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize.

Stephen Snyder teaches Japanese literature at Middlebury College. His translations include works by Kenzabur
ō
Ō
e, Ryu Murakami, Natsuo Kirino, and Miri Yu.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these stories are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

REVENGE.
Copyright © 1998 by Yoko Ogawa. English translation copyright © 2013 by Stephen Snyder. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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“Old Mrs. J” originally appeared in
Harper’s Magazine
, in slightly different form. “Afternoon at the Bakery” appeared in
Zoetrope: All Story
. “The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger” appeared in
Guernica
.

Cover design by Ervin Serrano

Cover photograph © Shutterstock

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

eISBN 9781250016171

Originally published as
Kamoku na shigai, Midara na tomurai
in Japan by Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha. English translation rights arranged with Yoko Ogawa through Japan Foreign-Rights Centre/Anna Stein.

First U.S. Edition: February 2013