comment on structure

Yoko Ogawa’s book “Revenge” is a collection of eleven short stories which have common strands of plot between them, but which stand on their own separately. The stories themselves not only have common themes such as death and isolation, but characters and traces of plots that appear in other stories. Each story thus connects like a Mobius strip to each other in some way, directly or indirectly, clearly, or obscurely, leading to a never-ending chain of events that begins and ends, and begins and ends with “Afternoon in the Bakery” and “Poison Plants”. This endless cycle of connection is reflective of the ways in which human lives ultimately influence one another, sometimes in unknown ways.