Ogawa slowly and exquisitely shows her readers the perverse side of human relationships, almost as if she's moving a log to show us what is crawling underneath.

(Another of her novels, The Housekeeper and the Professor, is a much gentler story, showing Ogawa's range as a writer.) In Revenge: Stories, Ogawa revisits her earlier themes in an elegantly macabre collection of eleven linked stories. Two of her previously published books, Hotel Iris: A Novel and The Diving Pool: Three Novellas, introduce themes of unsettled families, unhealthy relationships between characters and food, and sado-masochism. Yoko Ogawa has made a name for herself as a writer who can unsettle her readers with her precise, detailed, impassive prose. The tone of her works varies, across the works and sometimes within the longer works, from the surreal, through the grotesque and the-sometimes grotesquely-humorous, to the psychologically ambiguous and even disturbing. The reader is presented with an acute description of what the protagonists, mostly but not always female, observe and feel and their somewhat alienated self-observations, some of which is a reflection of Japanese society and especially women's roles within in it. She works by accumulation of detail, a technique that is perhaps more successful in her shorter works the slow pace of development in the longer works requires something of a deus ex machina to end them. Kenzaburō Ōe has said, 'Yōko Ogawa is able to give expression to the most subtle workings of human psychology in prose that is gentle yet penetrating.' The subtlety in part lies in the fact that Ogawa's characters often seem not to know why they are doing what they are doing. In 2006 she co-authored „An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics“ with Masahiko Fujiwara, a mathematician, as a dialogue on the extraordinary beauty of numbers.Ī film in French, 'L'Annulaire“ (The Ringfinger), directed by Diane Bertrand, starring Olga Kurylenko and Marc Barbé, was released in France in June 2005 and subsequently made the rounds of the international film festivals the film, some of which is filmed in the Hamburg docks, is based in part on Ogawa's 'Kusuriyubi no hyōhon“ (薬指の標本), translated into French as 'L'Annulaire“ (by Rose-Marie Makino-Fayolle who has translated numerous works by Ogawa, as well as works by Akira Yoshimura and by Ranpo Edogawa, into French).

Her novel The Professor and his Beloved Equation has been made into a movie. Since 1988, she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Yōko Ogawa ( 小川洋子) was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, and lives in Ashiya.

Revenge book yoko