The Diving Pool

“Still waters run dark in these bright yet eerie novellas, whose crisp, almost guileless prose hides unexpected menace . . . Stephen Snyder’s elegant translations from the Japanese whet the appetite for more.”—The New York Times Book Review

 

“[The Diving Pool makes] one wish to read a full-length novel by Ogawa. Her fiction could be as fascinating as that of Haruki Murakami—a very stripped-down, lightly eerie version of Murakami.”—San Francisco Chronicle

 

“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. . . . 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.”—The Washington Post Book World

 

“Ogawa writes in a lean, muscular way that goes deep, exploring how malevolence co-exists with everyday impulse . . . She’s a disturbing writer; she creates a memorable unease.”—Los Angeles Times

“Yoko Ogawa opens her spooky collection of novellas, The Diving Pool, with a girl sitting poolside lusting after her foster brother, his body muscled and graceful as he stands on the high dive. In fact, bodies—their ability to attract or disgust—obsess the entire cast of lonely female characters with the intensity of a rarefied thriller. Thanks to Ogawa's distilled language, translated here by Stephen Snyder, the exploration of these eerie fascinations is more than another tour through postmodern alienation. It's more like a spelunking of internal landscapes.”—Karen Schechner, The Plain-Dealer (Cleveland)

“There’s a little black thorn in the heart of all three novellas comprising The Diving Pool . . . Thanks to Stephen Snyder’s smooth translation, [Ogawa] now joins Murakami and Oe in the Western canon. Like Murakami, Ogawa has a talent for creating fiction that could double as dream journal—only, Ogawa’s dreams bring you up from the diving pool in a cold sweat.”—Paste magazine

 

“Yoko Ogawa has long been recognized as one of Japan’s best writers of the postwar generation. Yet this prolific author has never received a major English translation of her work, despite an oeuvre that includes more than twenty volumes of fiction and nonfiction. Stephen Snyder has finally undertaken this task, superbly rendering Ogawa’s spare yet intimate style for stories in the New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope. The Diving Pool, also translated by Snyder, is the American debut of three of her award-winning novellas. . . . The strength of Ogawa’s writing lies in its visceral content: Emotions that might cause recoil instead draw one in by their very familiarity, and she can make cruelty seem desirable, even pleasurable.” —Bookforum

 

“In each of these exquisitely disturbing novellas, Ogawa steadily builds the tension to an unexpected crescendo that resolves into an uncertain reprieve. With quietly lovely moments juxtaposed against deep disquiet, Ogawa explores the dark side of motherhood, love, and dependence.”—Elle

“With her U.S. debut, The Diving Pool, award-winning Japanese author Yoko Ogawa delivers three novellas that specialize in slow-cooker creepiness . . . Ogawa’s morose and laconic style resonates—apparently straightforward, her affectless prose puts you in the care of a woman who’s going mad but doesn’t quite realize it.”—Time Out New York

“Ogawa’s collection of three novellas illustrates the power of defamiliarization beautifully. Each story is minimal in plot and character, straight-faced in manner, yet always uncanny . . . Devotees of Murakami and Natsuo Kirino will find this mélange of supermarket aisle-realism, black humor, repression and sadism vaguely, but not unpleasantly, familiar.” —The Tennessean

 

"Women—twisted, obsessive and inquisitive women—are the narrators of three novellas by Yoko Ogawa who explore and indulge in their dark sides without apology. Sparse and direct prose creates delicious suspense throughout each story, with Yoko Ogawa tapping so swiftly and unexpectedly into the women's psyches that the reader is often caught off-guard. Her characters' agitated thoughts don't always cross the line but maybe flirt with it, which make the stories even more tempting: Will she? Won't she? . . . She succeeds at making the reader squirm in these three novellas. You feel like you are standing so close to these characters that their disturbing musings might rub off on you."—Danica Coto, Associated Press

“A masterfully twisted triptych of dark novellas marks the American debut of a critically acclaimed Japanese fiction writer . . . A haunting collection, and a perfect example of the power of short fiction.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"The literary figure of the neurasthenic woman, about whose predicament Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote the psychological horror story 'The Yellow Wallpaper', returns in Ogawa's novellas. Unlike her American forebear, she isn’t closely watched, making for some deeply unsettling goings-on . . . At times each is as spine-tingling as a Stephen King creep show."—Ray Olson, Booklist