Yoko Ogawa's Wonderfully Dark Dreams

Hinzugefügt: 2026-06-07

[00:00:00]You can never just read one Yoko Ogawa book because you can never be sure what sort of book you're going to read. She's one of the most versatile authors of the modern canon and she's won basically every single Japanese literary award.

[00:00:13]Unfortunately, only six of her books are available in English translation, but I've read all of them and I want to talk to you about them as well as Yoko Ogawa today because I find her one of the most interesting writers in the way that she shifts, but she always keeps an undercurrent of darkness as she moves between horror fiction, more literary fiction, and young adult books which still have a faint undercurrent. If you've only encountered her, say, through The Memory Police, which is a really wonderful literary fiction which blends surrealism and a commentary on society, you might be completely surprised by Revenge: 11 Dark Stories of really horror disturbing fiction. If you've only encountered her through Mina's Matchbox, which is a rather cute coming-of-age story, you might be absolutely surprised by the other two.

[00:01:01]So, I think it's really worthwhile to dive deeply into Yoko Ogawa and talk about all of her works which I find very very interesting and rewarding each in their own way. As always, if you like this sort of content, please like and subscribe. My goal now is to get to 10,000 subscribers by the end of the year and it might motivate me to do a special video, maybe the top 10 books that I have ever read. Though, that might be a lot of work, so maybe I'll wait till 20,000 in a few years to to actually do the work to put that together. But, let's dive into I think one of the most interesting modern authors with a real dark undercurrent and web to her work which is very visible or a bit more invisible, but always worth noting. And if people have read her untranslated Japanese fiction, please let me know if some of these themes still resonate through her larger works cuz this is only a small sample of a very prolific author that I'm really excited for people to know about. Let's start with some of Ogawa's horror fiction, which is some of her earliest work and includes a collection of three novellas, which was my top read a few years ago and really my first love affair with Yoko Ogawa. All these stories are deeply disturbing but very interesting. The first one follows a sadistic schoolgirl and the horrible bullying and torture that she puts a young classmate through all while having a crush on a bright, upright student and how that all sort of falls apart upon discovery of her actions. The second one is a wonderful folly uh de uh pregnancy diary where a woman is pregnant and her sister is also going a bit weird and you wonder who is going weird if they're going weird together. And the last one is an incredibly surreal story called Dormitory where a person is living in a house with a triple amputee and you're never really sure what is fact and what is fiction. And so, each novel works as a progression almost into madness where you have this horrific events in the first one followed by a breaking of reality in the second with a complete breaking in the third and I think it just flows so wonderfully and uniquely.

[00:03:08]Ogawa's prose is so calculated and clear that there's almost a coldness to it but it's more a calculation that really just creates the most effect that you can with each sentence as you will see throughout all of her work. This is something that really flows through. I have to credit her translators which really make this prose just work so, so well. This was the second book that I ever read of Ogawa's and it was much more preferable to me than Revenge which I still liked, which I'll talk about next, but this one I think the novella form really allows Ogawa to stretch a little bit but not too much and I think the structure of each of these flowing into each other works so incredibly well. Yes, it's disturbing and there is an obsession with physical violence as well as mental instability which follows through, but I think this is just a really wonderful introduction to the darkness of Ogawa. And if you've read Revenge, I think this is absolutely a step up. Now, Revenge is the first Ogawa book that I ever picked up, so excuse my shotty memory for all of the tales, but it is a really interesting collection because all the short stories are interconnected. We start out with someone waiting at a I think it's a dessert stand or a pastry shop, and you get a horrible narration of a son dying asphyxiated in a refrigerator. And all the stories sort of flow like this.

[00:04:36]There's another of a really uncomfortable dinner. There's another of a young student chopping off body parts.

[00:04:43]There's another organ transplant story.

[00:04:44]And the characters that are peripheral in one story take center stage in the other series. this connected web of darkness. I think short stories don't work as well here because they don't allow the stretch, I think, for really Ogawa to dig into the darkness. And sometimes they can feel a little one note, but what I do find fascinating in this work is the passivity of the characters. There's a lot of observation of others' actions, which makes it really interesting and almost dreamlike in your observations where you just feel powerless to stop what's happening. And this echoes in her novella collection, The Diving Pool, as well. This just sense that you are floating through the dark madness, and somehow you might come out on the other side, or you might just be lost in this whirlpool of darkness.

[00:05:41]And if you only read these two stories, I think you'd be be surprised by moving into her literary fiction. Though there is again a darkness, I think it's put to a different perspective in The Memory Police as well as Hotel Iris, which is the most recent book of hers that I read, which I think is incredible and incredibly dark in a different way. So The Memory Police is I think Ogawa's most famous novel. It was nominated for the Booker Prize, I believe, and a lot of my friends have read it, but it also defies a lot of easy categorization. To me it feels spiritually similar to I who have never known men in that it conjures this strange dystopia, but it evades any easy answers. In the novel, people forget the use of everyday objects, and seeing those things causes a lot of confusion. So if the Memory Police which removes those objects from the reality so that they don't trouble people. And eventually it escalates to removing the people who remember things themselves, and our protagonist interacts with a neighbor who remembers everything, and as she forgets things, he tries to remember, and it just becomes this thing as all of the world goes away, and this authoritarian force takes away everything that holds existence.

[00:06:58]Starting it, I thought it would be a pretty straightforward political allegory, but it really resists that because you're never really sure if it's an authoritarian regime or just a commentary on the world slowly falling apart as you age. It could be a metaphor for dementia, but it is a really unsettling experience, and I think Ogawa really digs into this and doesn't provide any sort of easy answers or really a real-world thing to grab onto.

[00:07:27]I think you can pull a whole range of meanings from this book, but I think what you'll get at the very end is just a deep troubling of your senses of what do you really remember things if they started to disappear? How would you react if you forgot an everyday object or an everyday person? And would you believe that there is an authority that's taking people away? How would you let things escalate, which I think is probably the most straightforward allegory in our political times. I think it's a really successful work. It is a very frustrating work because it elides those answers, but I think it's a really wonderful literary fiction, very close to horror, and that is very similar to Hotel Iris, which is horrifying in its own way. When I picked up Hotel Iris, it's the one book that people don't really talk about that I haven't seen discussion on, and when I read it, I understood why. It follows a sad 17-year-old girl who works at her mother's seaside hotel. Her mother is abusive, and one day she hears a very authoritative voice ordering a prostitute from his room. It belongs to a much older man who works as a translator from Russian to Japanese, and she is very intrigued by his voice, and the only thing she can think of is she wants to be ordered around by it. They end up meeting, and they fall into a sadomasochistic relationship, which really has no boundaries, no safe words. They both fall into it together. He escalates it extremely, but she, in her narration, enjoys the debasement and the humiliation almost as if she is seeking an full erasure of her existence. It's a horrifying descent, but Ogawa also writes it so that it is almost thrillingly erotic, but it is uncomfortable because it is a 17-year-old girl, a much older man.

[00:09:21]There is a lot of issues in consent with this, but it is a really troubling novel about a really bad relationship and a girl who doesn't really have much love in her life. Her father is missing. Her mother is really awful to her. There is a brief respite where the translator's nephew comes to visit, but of course in true Ogawa fashion, there is some body horror. He is missing his tongue and only writes by notes. And this book, I think is one that will stick with me for a very, very long time. It is hard to recommend because the central relationship is so awful, the descent is so horrifying, but the symbolism, the repetition of patterns that Ogawa evokes is really fantastic. I think if you're going to put this in a category, it would be with Nabokov's Lolita, where it is something that's horrible, the subject matter, but it is executed so well. Obviously not with the flourishes of Nabokov's English prose, but I think Ogawa's structure and style works so, so well here to evoke the mood and personality of this young narrator as she falls apart and seeks to fall apart.

[00:10:37]One of the most transporting books that I've ever read. Now, if you've been following along so far, you might be surprised by the next category that we move into, which is young adult fiction.

[00:10:46]I know I was very surprised by Mina's Matchbox when I picked it up. It's a rather charming coming of age story of a young girl who goes to live at her cousin's house in the summer. Her cousin is half Japanese, half white, and very wealthy from the sale of this soft drink Fresca, and they have a little animal uh petting zoo, uh garden, and just sort of going through life and adventurous first crushes, discovering the world. It's an absolutely lovely book on the surface, but of course we are Yoko Ogawa, so we're going to put a lot of weird darkness in this, where if you are reading as a child, maybe you don't notice, but as an older person, you might begin to see some cracks within this world that Ogawa has set up. For instance, the family's fortune is based on this sick love drink, Fresy, which is actually made with radium. This is never commented upon that radium is an incredibly deadly radioactive substance, which was responsible for many, many deaths when it was first discovered. But in this world, it is just a lovely, delightful addition to the souls.

[00:11:51]There's also a really horrific description of the death of an animal where they have this model train that goes through and then pastors can ride on it and it kills an animal.

[00:12:00][clears throat] And so all of this really dark things flow through as well.

[00:12:05]There's some commentary on class inequality and wealth with this older cousin. So I think this theme goes through, but it's a lot lighter touch than we've accounted with Ogawa before.

[00:12:17]She can't quite give it up, but it really shows, I think, a versatility.

[00:12:21]Again, the power here is getting into the psychology of our main character as she goes through new experiences. For this one, it's mostly just discovering about the world, developing relationships, as well as just seeing things. The book also just glides over really dark events. For instance, the hostage taking at the Munich Olympics, which they are watching in real time.

[00:12:43]And all of these things might, as a child, pass you over, but I think Ogawa really enjoys just adding these little things in. Sort of how in children's movies you'll have jokes for adults, Ogawa has a little darkness left over for the adults who might read this with her children. It's a really interesting book, I think, that anyone can really pick up. And this continues in the last book of hers that I read, which is, I think, the most recent one that has been translated into English, which is The Housekeeper and The Professor. This is another story which, on the surface, seems quite sweet. It follows a housekeeper who is a single mother of a young son. She starts taking care of an old professor who had a brain injury, and he only has a memory lasting for 80 minutes. So he has these old suits that he wears everywhere, very formal, and he pins these notes to things so he remembers. And so, he starts to develop a relationship with the house court keeper, things start to sneak through, and develops a really lovely relationship with her son. He was a math professor, he he understands math really well, so he helps the son learn, and they actually end up bonding over baseball. There's a really lovely uh description of Japanese baseball and the most numerical of sports and think for a lot of analysis and this really lovely thing. But again, Ogawa, we have darkness. But you will notice, as I've gone through these books, these are published in chronological order and I've talked about them in chronological order. We have a lot of the lighter darkness. So, for here, it's things about the uh class difference between the mother who's very working class and the more elegant and uh landed class of the professor. There's also a really interesting thing about an affair that he had and how that goes through, as well as just the horrors of losing your mind, which actually also echoes a bit The Memory Police. But here, all of that troubles quite a bit less. And so, if you fell in love with Ogawa in her really dark period, I'm not sure there's as much for you here, even as I enjoyed this book very much. I do like her darker moments, and I think I like her darker literary fiction best, where she's bridging between these worlds as much as she can. But I do, again, just want to emphasize how wonderful her style is at finding the psychological hooks into her protagonist, really creating complex people, and explaining them in really lovely, clear ways that really just puts you into their minds.

[00:15:13]So, if you have a protagonist who's really making all of the wrong choices, such as in Hotel Iris, you do sympathize and you pull along with her. I think you absolutely have to check out Yoko Ogawa if you haven't. If you've only read one of her books, check out one of the others in the other genres that I've talked about here and maybe you'll find something for you because I think she really has written something for everyone from the literary fiction heads to the horror heads to the people who like a bit more of a cozy story. There's everything in Yoko Ogawa and I hope that more of her works are translated from Japanese into English because I'm sure there are even more treasures out there.

[00:15:53]Again, if you have read them in Japanese, let me know if there's anything that you would add to this. If you have read these books in English and I've missed things, please let me know because again, I love to open up a discussion in the comments about these books, about these authors because I think there needs to be these larger discussions about the literary scene.

[00:16:12]You don't just have to talk about a single book or list all the books that you read in the month. Sometimes it's better to just create these thematic focuses and really discuss some of the great authors that are working today and have worked in the past. As always, I'm going to talk to you soon. I'm going to try to do a couple dives into some Canadian authors who you might not have heard of. They'll probably get a lot fewer likes and subscribes, but the whole point of this channel is just to talk about books that I enjoy, hopefully get some people reading them, and you know, support literature in general as well as provide some fair critique of my own subjective opinions about the books because not every book is perfect, especially perfect for you. And just because you critique something doesn't mean it's bad. It just means it might not have worked for you. So, continue to check on my channel. I'll be posting videos about bi-weekly um in these longer deep dives. I'll probably do a half-year review of the books that I've read through. I think I should hit about 70 uh by the end of June, so that'll be pretty exciting. As well, I'll post my short little critiques of books. I should have some fun ones coming out soon. And I will talk to you soon. Thank you again so much for all your support.

[00:17:24]This has been a really lovely experience starting this channel a bit over a year and a half ago and just seeing all the really lovely literary people that come to listen to me rant about books and add some wonderful things in the discussion that really add to my own enjoyment and understanding of books.

[00:17:43]Um it's been really, really lovely. I'll talk to you soon.