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The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
Reader Score
78%
78% of readers
recommend this book
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.Book Details
- Publisher: Picador USA
- Publish Date: Jul 1st, 2025
- Pages: 192
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.20in - 5.30in - 0.60in - 0.35lb
- EAN: 9781250375964
- Categories: • Short Stories (single author)• Literary• World Literature - Japan
About the Author
Ogawa, Yoko: - Yoko Ogawa is the author of The Diving Pool, The Housekeeper and the Professor, and Hotel Iris. Her 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 novel The Housekeeper and the Professor has been adapted into a film, The Professor's Beloved Equation. She lives in Ashiya, Japan, with her husband and son.
Van Den Berg, Laura: - Laura van den Berg is the author of the story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, The Isle of Youth, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, which was named one the ten best fiction books of 2020 by TIME, and the novels Find Me and The Third Hotel, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and named a best book of 2018 by more than a dozen publications. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award and a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Award, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.
Snyder, Stephen: - Stephen Snyder teaches Japanese literature at Middlebury College. His translations include works by Kenzaburō Ōe, Ryu Murakami, Natsuo Kirino, and Miri Yu.
Praise for this book
"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