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Summary
Summary
The first major English translation of one of contemporary Japan's bestselling and most celebrated authors
From Akutagawa Award-winning author Yoko Ogawa comes a haunting trio of novellas about love, fertility, obsession, and how even the most innocent gestures may 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 boarding house 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.
Author Notes
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 has won every major Japanese literary award. 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 Kzaburo Oe, Ryu Murakami, Natsuo Kirino, and Miri Yu.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this first book-length translation into English, Japanese author Ogawa's three polished tales demonstrate her knack for a crafty, suspenseful hook. Each is narrated in the listless, emotionally remote voice of a young woman, such as the high schooler of the title story whose infatuation with her foster brother, Jun, prompts her to obsessively observe his diving practice. As the daughter of religious parents who run an orphanage, Aya feels alienated from the workings of the so-called Light House and finds an outlet for her frustration in romantic fantasy about Jun as well as in tormenting-shockingly-an orphan baby. The underhandedly creepy "Dormitory" is narrated by a Tokyo wife who begins nursing the ailing, armless one-legged manager at her old college dormitory. The manager's increasingly alarming tale of love for one of the renters, now vanished, enthralls the wife. "Pregnancy Diary" offers a bit of levity, narrated by a young unmarried woman whose rage toward her pregnant sister take the form of cooking her grapefruit jam prepared from fruit treated with a chromosome-altering chemical. Ogawa's tales possess a gnawing, erotic edge. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
The literary figure of the neurasthenic woman, about whose predicament Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote the psychological horror story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), returns in Ogawa's novellas. Unlike her American forebear, she isn't closely watched, making for some deeply unsettling goings-on. In The Diving Pool, the world of the teenage only-child daughter of orphanage-maintaining parents centers on watching her foster brother practice diving and on surreptitiously torturing the youngest orphan, a toddler. Pregnancy Diary seems to be a young woman's journal of her sister's unconscionably long-drawn-out morning sickness, subsequent insatiable and peculiar appetite, and then delivery at the clinic she always assumed she would use but that is deserted when the diarist goes there to meet my sister's ruined child. A woman awaiting her husband's signal to join him abroad arranges for a college-entering cousin to live in her old Dormitory and falls into nursing the manager, a dying triple amputee. There's nothing magical about these calmly realistic first-person narratives, yet at times each is as spine-tingling as a Stephen King creep show.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Still waters run dark in these bright yet eerie novellas, whose crisp, almost guileless prose hides unexpected menace. In the title story, Aya, a high school student, is obsessed with the graceful body of a young diving enthusiast and the suffering of a child on whom she unleashes a strangely calm cruelty: "I wanted to savor every one of Rie's tears, to run my tongue over the damp, festering, vulnerable places in her heart and open the wounds even wider." Another novella is the perplexing account of two sisters, one apparently keeping a record of the other's pregnancy. At first, the mother-to-be seems the more troubled, with her bizarre cravings and visits to a psychiatrist. Then again, perhaps it's the diarist we should be keeping an eye on. In the final novella, a lonely woman helps settle her young cousin into her old college residence, which has fallen into disrepair since the unexplained disappearance of a student. This nameless narrator can't stay away from the dorm or its spooky manager, who is missing a leg and both arms and says he is dying. She begins visiting every day, only belatedly wondering why her cousin never seems to be around. Stephen Snyder's elegant translations from the Japanese whet the appetite for more. Alison McCulloch, a former editor at the Book Review, lives in New Zealand.
Guardian Review
Yoko Ogawa's British debut is inexcusably belated. A prolific writer and the winner of every major literary award in Japan, Ogawa has appeared in the New Yorker and had a novel filmed, yet she has never previously been published in Britain. The Diving Pool is the first of her book-length works to be translated into English. Ogawa is a conspicuously gifted writer, and this small showcase of three novellas must surely create a readership for her particular brand of unnerving, translucent restraint. Not a word is wasted, yet each resonates with a blend of poetry and tension. In the mesmerising title novella, teenage Aya is secretly entranced by Jun, a long-term inhabitant of an orphanage Aya's religious parents run. Having shared an upbringing, Jun is effectively Aya's foster brother, and she is "the only child who is not an orphan, a fact that has disfigured my family". Desiring nothing more than to spend her time watching Jun practising his diving after school, Aya sits silently absorbing the "cold elegance" of his muscle formation as he twists through the air again and again: "I don't seem to have any reason to be here at all. I just sit and look at Jun's wet body." Their joint home, called the Light House, lies bathed in "green darkness" behind a screen of looming ginkgo trees, a profusion of weeds and tiny insects. Aya's awareness of Jun changes as the two grow, and now when he returns home from diving practice, she watches his muscles "warm and soften like silk floss". Every moment with him is charged. The seductive pull of cruelty intervenes. The grief of a toddler named Rie, the youngest child in the orphanage, excites Aya to the point where "I wanted to savour every one of Rie's tears, to run my tongue over the damp, festering, vulnerable places in her heart and open the wounds even wider". Aya traps the toddler in a large urn, and the child's paroxysms of distress empower as they excite her. "The Diving Pool" is so emotionally authentic that an easy romantic resolution would come as a disappointment, and indeed Ogawa fulfils expectations: the dark side of the human psyche is revealed, the evil impulses that coexist with benevolence unravelled. "Pregnancy Diary" won the Akutagawa prize in Japan, and, like the other two novellas here, features an emotionally displaced female narrator. The diary in question is kept by a woman about her sister's pregnancy, each stage scrutinised in detail with a disquieting distance. As with all Ogawa's stories, there is a tugging sense of something awry. The focus is not on the foetus but on food, on revulsion and then greed as the narrator makes her sister vats of grapefruit jam that is possibly toxic. It is hard to know whose delusions are dominant in this world of psychological ambiguity. Women in Ogawa's work are essentially impassive, numbed, even dazed, tending to seek power through cruelty towards weaker specimens. Their disconcerting inertia in response to their restricted roles is counterpoised with eruptions and vicious twists, always described with a characteristic coolness of tone. The sense of alienation, of cultural universality, and the use of odd disappearances is reminiscent of Haruki Murakami. In "Dormitory", a woman sits sewing a patchwork quilt in Tokyo while waiting for her husband to summon her to Sweden. Her young cousin then phones asking to stay in the hall of residence she herself lived in as a student. The manager of the college dormitory is a dying triple amputee obsessed with healthier students' body parts. As the cousin moves in and then seems to disappear, the narrator is drawn into a warped world in which the sickly buzzing of bees and garish tulip colours threaten to drown out normal human life as a backdrop to madness. Again, Ogawa appears to be obeying one genre's conventions - here the standard horror story - before veering away just in time. In this case, a sinister ending is forsaken for a more symbolic one. As Kenzaburo Oe has observed, "Yoko Ogawa is able to give expression to the most subtle workings of human psychology". Her exquisite, controlled prose avoids becoming brittle through her depth of emotional understanding. To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state tinged with a nightmare, and her stories continue to haunt. She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance. She should be discovered in Britain, and this book must surely begin the process. Joanna Briscoe's novel Sleep with Me is published by Bloomsbury. To order The Diving Pool for pounds 9.50 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-ogawa.1 In the mesmerising title novella, teenage Aya is secretly entranced by Jun, a long-term inhabitant of an orphanage Aya's religious parents run. Having shared an upbringing, Jun is effectively Aya's foster brother, and she is "the only child who is not an orphan, a fact that has disfigured my family". Desiring nothing more than to spend her time watching Jun practising his diving after school, Aya sits silently absorbing the "cold elegance" of his muscle formation as he twists through the air again and again: "I don't seem to have any reason to be here at all. I just sit and look at Jun's wet body." Their joint home, called the Light House, lies bathed in "green darkness" behind a screen of looming ginkgo trees, a profusion of weeds and tiny insects. Aya's awareness of Jun changes as the two grow, and now when he returns home from diving practice, she watches his muscles "warm and soften like silk floss". Every moment with him is charged. The seductive pull of cruelty intervenes. The grief of a toddler named Rie, the youngest child in the orphanage, excites Aya to the point where "I wanted to savour every one of Rie's tears, to run my tongue over the damp, festering, vulnerable places in her heart and open the wounds even wider". Aya traps the toddler in a large urn, and the child's paroxysms of distress empower as they excite her. - Joanna Briscoe.
Kirkus Review
A masterfully twisted triptych of dark novellas marks the American debut of a critically acclaimed Japanese fiction writer. While Ogawa's novellas aren't technically linked, they are bound thematically--in each, a female loner is driven to explore the dark underbelly of her otherwise normal life. The first and strongest piece is narrated by the teenage daughter of a pastor who runs an orphanage. While she is raised with several siblings, she is the only child with "real" parents. She falls in love with one foster brother, obsessively watching his diving practice from the stands, but her only other pleasure is secretly torturing the youngest member of the household, toddler Rie. In the second novella, a woman goes to painstaking lengths to record the daily moods and eating habits of her pregnant sister, following her from a painfully long bout with morning sickness to a period of intense hunger and weight gain. The narrator literally feeds her sister's needs, first abandoning cooking altogether to help her avoid nausea and then creating large batches of the grapefruit jam that she craves. But despite these efforts, it is difficult to tell how real the pregnancy actually is, and if not, which sister has fabricated it. Finally, the third novella deals with a young wife on the brink of joining her husband for a new life in Sweden. Instead of running the last-minute errands he assigns her from afar, she visits her old landlord, a triple-amputee with declining health and a questionable role in the disappearance of a young resident. The surreal plotlines of the three pieces interact brilliantly, underscoring the utter desperation to which extreme loneliness can lead. A haunting collection, and a perfect example of the power of short fiction. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
THE DIVING POOL It's always warm here: I feel as though I've been swallowed by a huge animal. After a few minutes, my hair, my eyelashes, even the blouse of my school uniform are damp from the heat and humidity, and I'm bathed in a moist film that smells vaguely of chlorine. Far below my feet, gentle ripples disrupt the pale blue surface of the water. A constant stream of tiny bubbles rises from the diving well; I can't see the bottom. The ceiling is made of glass and is very high. I sit here, halfway up the bleachers, as if suspended in midair. Jun is walking out on the ten-meter board. He's wearing the rust-colored swimsuit I saw yesterday on the drying rack outside the window of his room. When he reaches the end of the board, he turns slowly; then, facing away from the water, he aligns his heels. Every muscle in his body is tensed, as if he were holding his breath. The line of muscle from his ankle to his thigh has the cold elegance of a bronze statue. Sometimes I wish I could describe how wonderful I feel in those few seconds from the time he spreads his arms above his head, as if trying to grab hold of something, to the instant he vanishes into the water. But I can never find the right words. Perhaps it's because he's falling through time, to a place where words can never reach. "Inward two-and-a-half in the tuck position," I murmur. He misses the dive. His chest hits the water with a smack and sends up a great spray of white. But I enjoy it just the same, whether he misses a dive or hits it perfectly with no splash. So I never sit here hoping for a good dive, and I am never disappointed by a bad one. Jun's graceful body cuts through these childish emotions to reach the deepest place inside me. He reappears out of the foam, the rippling surface of the water gathering up like a veil around his shoulders; and he swims slowly toward the side of the pool. I've seen pictures from underwater cameras. The frame is completely filled with deep blue water, and then the diver shoots down, only to turn at the bottom and kick off back toward the surface. This underwater pivot is even more beautiful than the dive itself: the ankles and hands slice through the water majestically, and the body is completely enclosed in the purity of the pool. When the women dive, their hair flutters underwater as though lifted in a breeze, and they all look so peaceful, like children doing deep-breathing exercises. One after the other, the divers come slipping into the water, making their graceful arcs in front of the camera. I would like them to move more slowly, to stay longer, but after a few seconds their heads appear again above the surface. Does Jun let his body float free at the bottom of the pool, like a fetus in its mother's womb? How I'd love to watch him to my heart's content as he drifts there, utterly free. I spend a lot of time on the bleachers at the edge of the diving pool. I was here yesterday and the day before, and three months ago as well. I'm not thinking about anything or waiting for something; in fact, I don't seem to have any reason to be here at all. I just sit and look at Jun's wet body. We've lived under the same roof for more than ten years, and we go to the same high school, so we see each other and talk any number of times every day. But it's when we're at the pool that I feel closest to Jun--when he's diving, his body nearly defenseless in only a swimsuit, twisting itself into the laid-out position, the pike, the tuck. Dressed in my neatly ironed skirt and freshly laundered blouse, I take my place in the stands and set my schoolbag at my feet. I couldn't reach him from here even if I tried. Yet this is a special place, my personal watchtower. I alone can see him, and he comes straight to me. I pass the shops near the station and turn from the main road onto the first narrow street heading south, along the tracks. The noise and bustle die away. It's May now, and even when I reach the station after Jun's practice, the warmth of the day lingers in the air. After I pass the park--little more than a sandbox and a water fountain--the company dormitory, and the deserted maternity clinic, there's nothing to see but rows of houses. It takes more than twenty-five minutes to walk home, and along the way the knot of people who left the station with me unravels and fades away with the sunlight. By the end, I'm usually alone. A low hedge runs along the side of the road. It eventually gives way to trees, and then the cinder-block wall, half covered with ivy, comes into view. In the places where the ivy doesn't grow, the wall has turned moss green, as if the blocks themselves were living things. Then the gate, standing wide open, held back by a rusted chain that seems to prevent it from ever being closed. In fact, I have never seen it closed. It's always open, ready to welcome anyone who comes seeking God in a moment of trouble or pain. No one is ever turned away, not even me. Next to the gate is a glass-covered notice board with a neon light, and on it is posted the Thought for the Week: WHO IS MORE PRECIOUS? YOU OR YOUR BROTHER? WE ARE ALL CHILDREN OF GOD, AND YOU MUST NEVER TREAT YOUR BROTHER AS A STRANGER. Every Saturday afternoon, my father spends a long time looking through the Bible before carefully grinding ink on his stone and writing out this Thought. The smell of the ink permeates the old box where he keeps his brushes and grinding stone. He pours a few drops from the tiny water pot into the well of the stone, and then, holding the ink stick very straight, he grinds the stick into a dark liquid. Only when he finishes this long process does he finally dip his brush. Each gesture is done slowly, almost maddeningly so, as if he were performing a solemn ritual, and I am always careful to creep quietly past his door to avoid disturbing him. Attracted to the neon light, countless tiny insects crawl on the notice board among my father's perfectly formed characters. At some point, evening has turned to night. The darkness inside the gate seems even thicker than outside, perhaps due to the dense foliage that grows within. Trees are planted at random along the wall, their branches tangled and overgrown. The front yard is covered in a thick jumble of weeds and flowers. In this sea of green, two massive ginkgo trees stand out against the night sky. Every autumn, the children put on work gloves to gather the nuts. As the oldest, Jun climbs up on one of the thick branches and shakes the tree, and then the younger children run around frantically amid the hail of nuts and dried yellow leaves. Passing near the trees always makes me think of the soft skins surrounding the nuts, squashed like caterpillars on the soles of the children's shoes, and of the horrible odor they spread through the house. To the left of the ginkgo trees is the church, and at an angle beyond, connected by a covered corridor, the building we call the Light House. This is my home. The pale blue moisture I absorbed in the stands at the pool has evaporated by the time I reach here; my body is dry and hollow. And it is always the same: I can never simply come home the way other girls do. I find myself reading the Thought for the Week, passing through the gate, entering the Light House--and something always stops me, something always seems out of place. Sometimes, as I approach, the Light House appears fixed and acute, while I, by contrast, feel vague and dim. At other times, I feel almost painfully clear and sharp, while the Light House is hazy. Either way, there is always something irreconcilable between the house and me, something I can never get past. This was my home. My family was here. Jun, too. I remind myself of these facts each time I surrender to the curtain of green and open the door of the Light House. When I try to put my memories in some kind of order, I realize that the earliest ones are the clearest and most indelible. It was a brilliant morning in early summer. Jun and I were playing by the old well in the backyard. The well had been filled in long before and a fig tree planted over it. We must have been four or five years old, so it was soon after Jun had come to live at the Light House. His mother had been a chronic alcoholic, and he had been born out of wedlock, so one of our loyal parishioners had brought him to us. I had broken off a branch from the fig tree and was watching the opalescent liquid ooze from the wound. When I touched it, the sticky emission clung to my finger. I broke another branch. "Time for milky!" I said to Jun. I made him sit on my lap, and I wrapped an arm around his shoulders as I brought the branch to his lips. Nothing about Jun's body then hinted at the muscular form later shining in the transparent water of the pool. My arms remember only the softness of an ordinary small child. Like a baby at the breast, he pursed his lips and made little chirping sounds, even wrapping his hands around mine as if he were clutching a bottle. The milk of the fig had a bitter, earthy smell. I felt myself suddenly overcome by a strange and horrible sensation. It might have been the fig milk or the softness of Jun's body bringing it on, but that seemed to be the beginning--though I suppose it's possible this terrible feeling took hold of me even earlier, before I was even born. I broke a thicker branch with more milk and smeared it against his mouth. He knit his brow and licked his lips, and at that moment the sunlight becomes intensely bright, the scene blurs to white, and my oldest memory comes to an end. Since that time, I've had many similar moments, and I can never hear the words "family" and "home" without feeling that they sound strange, never simply hear them and let them go. When I stop to examine them, though, the words seem hollow, seem to rattle at my feet like empty cans. Excerpted from The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa. Copyright © 1991 by Yoko Ogawa. Published in 1991 by Picador. All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher. Excerpted from The Diving Pool: Three Novellas by Yoko Ogawa All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| The Diving Pool | p. 1 |
| Pregnancy Diary | p. 55 |
| Dormitory | p. 107 |
