Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa
Published 1998 · 45,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Gothic Fiction
How hard is Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales to read?
Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales scores 67 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 38 out of 100
- Plain, transparent prose in Snyder's translation, with occasional precise vocabulary for baking, surgery, taxidermy and bag-making.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Short, calm sentences and simple constructions throughout, deliberately flat against the material.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Concrete surfaces and objects, but the stories operate on a logic closer to dream than to argument, and their subject — how grief distorts perception — is never named.
- Information density: 42 out of 100
- Short pieces with small casts, though the reader must track objects, minor characters and locations across all eleven stories to see the structure.
- Narrative indirection: 76 out of 100
- Narrators report atrocity in the register of a shopping trip, motives are never given, and the relationship between the stories is left entirely for the reader to assemble.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- The refrigerator, the heart outside the chest, the hand-shaped carrots, the tiger and the recurring strawberry shortcakes work as an interlocking system of images rather than as plot.
- Ironic distance: 76 out of 100
- The whole book depends on the gap between the calm of the telling and the content of what is told, with politeness maintained through mutilation and murder.
- Resolution withholding: 82 out of 100
- No story concludes in the ordinary sense, several break off mid-scene, and the collection closes by looping back to its opening without explaining any of the connections it has made.
- Structural complexity: 78 out of 100
- Eleven stories chained so that each takes a detail from the last, arranged in a closed loop where the final story contains the first, a structure the reader discovers rather than is told.
How Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales is regarded
Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales holds a literary regard score of 64 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.