The Diving Pool, by Yoko Ogawa
Three Novellas Translated by Stephen Snyder
Publisher: Picador USA
Publication Date: January 2008
ISBN: 9780312426835
A Collection of Three Novellas
The Diving Pool is the title of this collection of three novellas by Japanese author Yoko Ogawa. It is also the title of the first novella in the collection. In this dreamy, affecting story, a teenage girl named Aya relates her complicated infatuation with her foster brother Jun, a talented diver whose practices she watches without his knowledge. Aya is the biological child of a couple who run a Christian orphange, and Jun is one of the orphans.
Aya's emotions are kept tightly under cover, and sometimes the buried anger causes her to act abusively toward a younger orphan named Rie. Jun is the constant through it all: kind, dependable, nearly perfect. Eventually an intense thunderstorm forces Aya and Jun to wait inside the diving facility before they can walk home, and the conversation that ensues both changes Aya's life irretrievably and confirms what she thinks of herself as a human.
Not as emotional as The Diving Pool, Pregnancy Diary nonetheless explores family intimacy in the context of pregnancy. The narrator's sister and brother-in-law, with whom she lives, are expecting a baby, and have decided to deliver at a nearby maternity home where the two sisters hid out and played as children.
At first appalled by food to the point of despair, the narrator's sister (who, like the narrator and the brother-in-law, remains nameless throughout) later begins eating obsessively, causing her sister to worry about the health of the baby.
Throughout, the pregnancy and marriage remain a mystery to the sister, whose love for her pregnant sister is not spoken aloud, but which is evident in her actions, such as moving cooking equipment outside so the smell of food won't aggravate her sister's morning sickness. Perhaps because the three main characters remain nameless, the mystery of marriage and pregnancy, and the complicated relationship between sisters take on primary importance.
Dormitory, the final novella is narrated by a young Tokyo wife whose husband is in Sweden on business. Alone, she spends her days making quilts, until a young cousin starting college in Tokyo asks her assistance in finding living accomodations.
She takes the cousin to a dormitory where she used to live, run by an enigmatic man who has lost one leg and both arms, through an accident or illness that is never revealed. As the cousin settles into college life, the narrator begins visiting the manager, bringing him homemade food, and watching his health rapidly deteriorate.
As the manager's health deteriorates, the narrator notices a stain on the ceiling of his room slowly expanding. Eventually, on the evening when the manager lays dying, she explores the crawl spaces of the building in search of the cause of the mysterious stain, which has begun to drip into the manager's room as night falls and the light dies away.
A Profoundly Provocative Writer
This collection is beautiful and haunting. Ogawa's gift for infusing a small number of words with great effect and meaning verges on the poetic. Though the entire collection is only 164 pages long, its power is comparable to broad, sprawling novels of two or three times that length. The translator, Stephen Snyder, a professor at Middlebury College, has made a superb translation, rendering his own role invisible, allowing the full force of Ogawa's words to shine brilliantly.
In 1990, Yoko Ogawa won the Akutagawa Award, one of the most important awards for fiction in Japan. Stephen Snyder is Associate Professor of Japanese at Middlebury College in Vermont.
In abbreviated prose, Yoko Ogawa dives very deep
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