Customer Reviews

The Diving Pool: Three Novellas

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

A collection of disturbing stories by one of Japan's foremost contemporary writers, Yoko Ogawa mines the same headspace as Haruki Murakami and Natsuo Karino, with much different results. Whereas Haruki Murakami's protagonist, Boku, is typically a thirty-something, dissatisfied, disconnected, but generally good male, searching for he-knows-not-what, and Natsuo Kirino's violent female protagonists searching for power in the only ways that they know how. Yoko Ogawa's creations are cruel, but only because they can see no other options.

I notice from Crazy Fox's review that I am not the only one to connect Murakami and Ogawa. Crazy Fox suggests, "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," which I heartily agree with. I disagree, though, that the endings are unconvincing or that the cruelty herein is exaggerated. I think that the characters in this book (Aya, the unnamed part-time worker, and the triple amputee), are desperately reaching out to the world around them, perhaps in the only way that they can. As cheindemer suggests in a review largely identical to Yoko Ogawa's Wikipedia article, "her characters often don't seem to know why they're doing what they are," but this is precisely the point. They don't understand their cruelty. They don't understand why they can't reach out with love, and why their attempts to do so are rebuffed, or meaningless. Instead, they must reach out, cruelly and maliciously, to feel that connection, because perhaps only in this fashion can the devastatingly deep crevasses between us be crossed in these tableaux.

One reviewer, Jack M. Walter, suggests that, "[Yoko] Ogawa is certainly no Natsuo Karino." I certainly agree, and I couldn't be happier. Having read Real World by Karino, I must say that I find the disconnection between individuals that is arguably examined by the latter is much more reasonably considered here. Karino, at least in Real World, suggested that the disconnection between individuals has become so great that people will overlook practically anything in their desire to feel involved. Ogawa, on the other hand, suggests that people will DO practically anything in their desire to feel involved. The difference here is profound and manifest, making Ogawa's work have an immediate and beautiful impact that Karino is still striving for.

The stories in this collection are cruelly beautiful. The aesthetics are disturbingly wonderful. And the characters are chillingly lovable. They are human beings, desperately longing for a connection that they cannot feel. In all, Yoko Ogawa presents a horrible specter of humanity, one that may be all too real.

A-

Harkius

I normally don't enjoy short stories or novellas, but having read some of Yoko Ogawa's other work, I decided I'd give this compilation of three stories a try. Ogawa did an excellent job of creating three unique and slightly twisted stories. While each story felt complete, they all had a strange sense of the bizarre that left me with a definite sense of ambiguity. One thing I particularly appreciated was the insular and spartan nature of the stories. Each contained only a few locations, a minimal number of characters (3 in Pregnancy Diary, 3 in Dormitory, and a handful in The Diving Pool), and absolutely no extraneous interactions. With so little interactions between the protagonists and the outside world, Ogawa made it easy to question if the narrators' accounts of the story are truly accurate.

Of the three stories, I thought The Diving Pool was by far the best. However, the other two stories were compelling, if not quite as effective. Given the short length of the stories (about 50 pages each), you can finish the entire collection in a few hours. I'd strongly recommend making the investment in time and money to read this book.

I am finding myself completely falling in love with Japanese writing. I thought it was just Haruki Murakami, but as I start to expand my horizons, I'm finding more new authors to devour.

I found these stories beautifully written, and I wish there had been more. They are dark and haunting and the author succeeds brilliantly at creating a mood.

The back says that this is the first major English translation of this author, and I will definitely be hoping for more.

Oe is quoted as saying, 'Yoko Ogawa is able to give expression to the most subtle workings of human psychology in prose that is gentle yet penetrating,' and that's right, but her characters often don't seem to know why they're doing what they are. She works by accumulation of detail. On the whole, I find her shorter works more satsifying; the slow pace of development in the longer works requires something dramatic to happen to end them in ways which doesn't always come across as convincing. (I've read them in French translation as this is only Ogawa's second book to appear in English. There's a French collection with the same three stories; Snyder's translation of Pregnancy Diary appeared in The New Yorker (in abbreviated form?).)

I don't think James Elkins and I disagree that much about what's on the page. It's really a matter of whether the acute descriptions of what the protagonists, all female in this collection and in the majority of Ogawa's other works, observe and feel and their somewhat alienated self-observation is enough. (It is for me; I like her work a lot.) Some of what Elkins sees as 'oddly emotionless and empty' conversations and 'nearly mute and autistic' relationships are, I think -- I'm no expert, a reflection of Japanese society and especially women's roles and standings in it.

The three stories are different in tone. 'Dormitory' is more surreal, in a quiet way (less overtly surreal than some of Ogawa's works), and, I think, quietly amusing. 'Pregnancy Diary' and 'Diving Pool' are more of a pair, the latter perhaps less ambiguous, but both are disquieting, the more so as in each the protagonist's motives are opaque to herself.

From this collection of three "novellas" (really, they are just short stories, printed in a large font), it is not easy to see how Yoko Ogawa has won "every major Japanese literary award."

She has a very acute sense of sickening smells, oozy things (yoghurt, a baby's "buttery" thighs, past sauce that looks like intestinal juices), slippery wet clothes, the maggoty look of kiwi fruits, rancid cream puffs, and many other such things. She relies too much on them -- her characters live in a world of faintly pustulent, always redolent, sometimes gorgeously overripe flesh, and her narrators experience and describe their world exclusively through sensations. One thing that means is that they don't talk much. Conversations are oddly emotionless and empty, and relationships are nearly mute, or autistic, as if rank smells and fleshy textures had taken the place of language.

Having said that, the second story has an astonishingly excellent last line, and all three are, as the dust jacket says, memorable. I will be reading more of her: I just hope she shows more range.

I can only review one of the three stories, as in Spain it was published on its own, and translated as 'My sister's pregnancy'. I found the style terse, smooth and quite simple. However, when I finished the short story, I kept wondering for a while what on earth the author tries to say to us, readers, with a story like that. I still don't know. One thing I'm sure of is: what a devious mind you must have to imagine a character like the main one! I had to have a look at a picture of the author, and to my surprise (or should I have expected it?) she looked like she wouldn't say boo to a goose! Let's hope that there are not many people around here like that (the character I mean, not the author), doing - or intending to do - evil for no particular reason.

The three novellas in this book are very interesting, but they certainly don't live up to the hype of the reviews that are listed on the front and back covers; Ogawa is certainly no Natsuo Kirino. The first story is good but has an abrupt, unsatisfying ending. The second is peculiar and has lots of sensual detail. Only the last story, "Dormitory," is truly exceptional, giving us a disturbing portrait of a woman whose nephew has gone missing while living in a decaying dormitory building run by a man with only one limb. If the author sharpens her talent further, her prose will finally live up to its reputation.