The Diving Pool - by Yoko Ogawa (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

The first major English translation of one of contemporary Japan's bestselling and most celebrated authors.

From Akutagawa Prize-winning author Yoko Ogawa comes a trio of novellas about love, motherhood, fertility, obsession, and how even the most innocent gestures contain a hairline crack of cruel intent.

A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool--a peculiar infatuation that sends unexpected ripples through her life.

A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, taking meticulous note of a pregnancy that may or may not be a hallucination--but whose hallucination is it, hers or her sister's?

A woman nostalgically visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo, a boardinghouse run by a mysterious triple amputee with one leg.

Hauntingly spare, beautiful, and twisted, The Diving Pool is a disquieting and at times darkly humorous collection of novellas about normal people who suddenly discover their own dark possibilities.

Review Quotes

"Yoko Ogawa is able to give expression to the most subtle workings of human psychology in prose that is gentle yet penetrating." --Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel Prize-winning author of A Personal Matter

"Three beautifully-drawn and genuinely eerie stories. Each one builds an image that you can't quite shake out of your mind." --Aimee Bender, author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

"What a strange and compelling little volume this is. Yoko Ogawa's fiction is like a subtle, psychoactive drug. Long after you read it, The Diving Pool will remain with you, shifting your vision, eroding your composure, raising questions about even the most seemingly conventional people you encounter. Her gift is to both reveal and preserve the mystery of human nature." --Kathryn Harrison, bestselling author of The Kiss

"Ogawa is original, elegant, very disturbing. I admire any writer who dares to work on this uneasy territory--we're on the edge of the unspeakable. The stories seem to penetrate right to the heart of the world and find it a cold and eerie place. There are no narrative tricks, but the stories generate a surprising amount of tension. You feel as if you've touched an icy hand." --Hilary Mantel, author of The Wolf Hall

About the Author

Yoko Ogawa's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope. Since 1988 she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, and she has won Japan's most prestigious literary awards. Her books include The Housekeeper and the Professor, Revenge, and The Diving Pool.

Stephen Snyder teaches Japanese literature at Middlebury College. His translations include works by Kenzaburō Ōe, Ryu Murakami, Natsuo Kirino, and Miri Yu.