The Diving Pool: Three Novellas (Paperback)

~ Yoko Ogawa (Author), (Translator)
Key Phrases: diving pool, Light House, New Year

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
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From The Washington Post

These three quiet novellas, composing the first of Yoko Ogawa's books to be translated into English, share an eerie quality of nightmare, the precarious sense that beauty and distress are equally possible at any moment. Ogawa's fiction reflects like a funhouse mirror, skewing conventional responses, juxtaposing images weirdly. Depending on the viewer, it can induce wonder or a vague nausea.

In the title story, teenaged Aya is the only non-orphan in residence at the Light House, an orphanage run by her minister father. "I can never hear the words 'family' and 'home' without feeling that they sound strange, never simply hear them and let them go," she muses. Aya craves the freedom and purity epitomized by her foster brother, Jun, whom she watches obsessively at diving practice; and yet she is shockingly cruel to Rie, a toddler new to the Light House. Ogawa places the sublime alongside the repulsive, as if to prove how little may lie between them.

The single woman who narrates "Pregnancy Diary," winner of Japan's prestigious Akutagawa Award, is another remote observer, somehow detached from normal human interaction. Her sister is pregnant, but as the pregnancy progresses, the aunt-to-be feels not excitement but disgust: "Her whole body is swelling before my eyes," she thinks, "like a giant tumor." Discovering that her sister adores grapefruit jam, she makes it by the vat, while pondering recent reports of toxic pesticides used in citrus production. Suffused with ambiguity, the story is structured as a diary, which reduces nine months to a series of disconnected moments, the writer's attention repeatedly hooked by odd preoccupations: egg yolk dripping from a fork "like yellow blood," or the resemblance of her sister's chewing lips to "the thighs of a sprinter."

Though "Dormitory" follows a clearer narrative arc than the other two, it is also the most uninhibitedly bizarre. A young wife revisits her college dormitory, run by a courtly triple amputee. The crumbling building seems to pulse with a strange force, "a warm, rhythmic presence that seeped quietly into my skin." Returning repeatedly to care for the ailing Manager, she is transfixed by his account of a beloved student who has disappeared. Ogawa lets the story veer toward a conventionally sinister explanation, then swerves suddenly toward the outré.

Like her better known compatriot Haruki Murakami, Ogawa writes stories that float free of any specific culture, anchoring themselves instead in the landscape of the mind. Her hallucinatory, oddly barbed stories snag the imagination, and linger.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 1st edition (January 22, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312426836
• ISBN-13: 978-0312426835
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #426,889 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Deadly Grapefruit and Moldy Apple Pie, June 4, 2008

By	Daitokuji31 (Black Glass) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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Although virtually unknown in America, a few of her novels have been translated in Europe, Yoko Ogawa has been an important figure in the Japanese world of literature since she made her literary debut in 1988 and has won virtually all Japanese literary prizes including the Akutagawa Prize, for best literary fiction in 1990 at the age of 28, and the Tanizaki Prize in 2006 at the age of 44. Although some of her short works of fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope, The Diving Pool: Three Novellas marks the first time that a collected volume of Ogawa's works have been published in English.

The collection includes the title work, "Pregnancy Diary"--the work she won the Akutagawa Prize for--, and "Dormitory" all which were written in 1990 or 1991 marking them as some of Ogawa's earlier works that she wrote before the age of 30 during her budding years as a writer. Although young, Ogawa's writing is heavily tinged with melancholia and nostalgia and the mood of each piece is as cool and as sterile as her imagery of chlorinated pools and winter landscapes that punctuate her stories.

"The Diving Pool" concerns the life of Aya, a high school girl whose father is a preacher who runs a church and an orphanage called the Light House. Distant and feeling like an orphan who will never be adopted, Aya's sole interest is in watching her secret love, and orphan at her family's orphanage, Jun perform on the high dive. Unable to express her feelings to Jun, Aya lets her emotions turn into cruelty which she unleashes on a young girl less than two years old. "Pregnancy Diary" revolves around the triangular relationship amongst two sisters and the older sister's husband. It seems the older sister is pregnant, but the news does not seem to bring joy to the small household. The younger sister, a student, keeps a meticulous diary about her sister's eating habits which go from near nothing to huge amounts of near everything, especially her sister's homemade grapefruit jam. When the younger sister learns that some chemicals on American grapefruits can harm consumers, she makes sure she continues to buy American grapefruit. The final story in the collection is about a married woman who spends her days wrapped in the cocoon of her home making simple meals and making a patch quilt while waiting to hear from her husband to come join him in the cold, damp country of Sweden where his work had transferred. She would have probably remained in this cocoon if it had not been for a much younger cousin asking her questions about her old dormitory, a place ran by a manager missing one leg and both his arms and a place that is rotting from within because of its own desolation.

As I was reading The Diving Pool: Three Novellas, I felt myself entering a diaphanous, dreamlike state where everything was tinged with blue and gave off a cool dampness. However, it was not a good feeling. Each one of the female protagonists in the book seem to be trapped in positions that they do not desire and their powerlessness to change their positions radiate in cruelties to those more powerless than themselves such as when Aya in "The Diving Pool" traps a little girl in an urn and fantasizes about how she can further frighten the girl. The women seem to be trapped in a malaise where small respites of cruelty and interaction with even the most forlorn individuals pull them from their solitary natures to interact with the world thereby making the collection a sad, disturbing book.

With the release of The Diving Pool: Three Novellas and with another one of Ogawa's novels being released in the coming months, English readers will be able to read and enjoy one of Japan's most important female writers in the last thirty years. One who does rely on excessive sex or violence that has drawn attention to other Japanese female writers such as Hitomi Kanehara and Ami Sakurai.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unfettered, graceful, seductive, soft, and simple, March 20, 2008

By	Jamie S. Rich (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have been dying for some more Ogawa ever since I read two of her short stories in The New Yorker over two years ago and instantly fell for her prose. A novel that was supposed to come out last year never arrived, and it's been one long tease.

Ogawa writes with unfettered, graceful prose that is seductive in its softness and simplicity, lending even more shock value to her dark subjects. In the title story, a young girl who grew up in the orphanage run by her parents has grown obsessed with the only boy to ever live there long enough to reach high-school age, and her unfulfilled passions start to emerge in acts of cruelty directed at the home's newest and youngest member. It's disturbing without being exploitative and grotesque.

Amidst the calm writing are often wonderful images, such as a snow storm inside the house or lines like "He reappears out of the foam, the rippling surface of the water gathering up like a veil around his shoulders...." Ahhhhh.

The second story, "The Pregnancy Diaries," tackles a somewhat commonplace subject in a unique way. A woman keeps a journal chronicling her sister's pregnancy, writing about it in terms evocative of science fiction and horror. Yet, Ogawa does so without straining the metaphor or using obvious language.

The final story, "Dormitory," details a woman's return to the spartan housing that was her college apartment, and the strange triple-amputee landlord that lives there. It's a mystery tale, a gothic horror story, and yet also a personal soliloquy. The final image shows her reaching directly in the complex patterns that connect all life.

Wonderful stuff. Deep, yet reads like a breeze. Loved it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Off the Deep End, March 18, 2008

By	Crazy Fox (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

When in doubt, start at the beginning. It only makes sense then that the first book-length translation of fiction by Ogawa Yoko should include three short stories (or "novellas" [sic]) from the years 1990 and 1991, around the time her writing career was just kicking in. And while showing traces of a new writer just getting her bearings in the Japanese literary world, all three stories really stick with you. "The Diving Pool" and "Pregnancy Diary" are quietly chilling and enormously disquieting in their unsentimental and frank exploration of the streak of wanton cruelty and stifled but simmering resentment lurking in the psyches of ordinary, everyday people--a minister's teenage daughter with a girlhood crush and a part-time worker living with her pregnant sister and brother-in-law. Like a good writer, Ogawa shows rather than tells. She is incredibly adroit at using sensual data to get her point across and move the tale along, and the sicky-sweet and sometimes stomach-churning array of tastes, smells, and textures she weaves into her narrative communicates volumes to the attentive reader and lures them inexorably into a virtual synesthetic experience not so welcome in the final analysis.

After traipsing through the heart of darkness in humdrum urban Tokyo with these first two stories, you're then easily faked out by "Dormitory," which seems to be falling in the same direction but then throws you for a loop. An offbeat little sketch of a tale, not a single element is jarringly implausible in a discernibly empirical sense and yet the total effect is nonetheless unmistakably surreal. In this as well as a few recognizably typical tropes (inexplicable disappearance, for instance), it could almost be read as a homage to or parody of Murakami Haruki. And yet one can't shake the sense that Ogawa is pursuing similar themes of alienation and resentment in a slightly different register here in a way all her own.

As fiction goes, these are not great masterpieces, it must be said. There is something just a bit naggingly unsatisfying and unconvincing about each story, and the exaggerated cruelty Ogawa depicts seems just a tad over the top, as if she's maybe relying on shock value to make some waves. That said, these works show the enormous promise of an up-and coming author who has since established herself securely, and as such they should make quite a splash this side of the Pacific as well.