The Diving Pool: Three Novellas

By Yoko Ogawa and Stephen Snyder

The first major English translation of one of contemporary Japan's bestselling and most celebrated authors

From Akutagawa Award-winning author Yoko Ogawa comes a haunting trio of novellas about love, fertility, obsession, and how even the most innocent gestures may 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 boarding house 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jan 22, 2008
• ISBN: 9781429924955

Yoko Ogawa

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.

Book preview

Introduction

BY LAURA VAN DEN BERG

Yoko Ogawa’s characters are watchers. They hover on the edges of the world, observing—sometimes obsessively—the lives unfolding in their midst. In this way the three women at the center of The Diving Pool can feel a bit like ghosts, albeit ghosts who are still mired in the uneasy business of living.

The Diving Pool is a triptych of novellas. Taken together the stories create a landscape haunted by loneliness and secrecy, by the gaps that cannot be bridged between two people or even within the self. All three of the novellas are narrated in the first person, by women who have found themselves marginalized in their own lives. Their voices possess both the cool detachment of outsiders and a quicksilver urgency. All three stand, in their own distinct way, on the precipice of a great abyss. Perspective works like a camera lens, zooming in on objects of obsession and cutting away from the material the women would rather not confront. The unsayable is instead embodied by the physical spaces they move through.

In The Diving Pool, we meet Aya, the biological daughter of a couple who operate the Light House, a Christian orphanage. The orphanage grounds are old, Western-style wooden buildings, the layouts complicated by numerous unwieldy additions. Aya tells us that from the outside it is impossible to grasp their layout. Inside, they are more confusing still … there is always something irreconcilable between the house and me, something I can never get past.

Aya, too, is impossible to grasp from the outside. She might appear ordinary enough in her neatly ironed skirt and freshly laundered blouse, but she harbors a secret life that is shocking in its violence. Aya is the only child in the Light House who is not an orphan, a fact that leaves her feeling disfigured within her own family. She spends hours sitting in the bleachers by the diving pool, watching one of the orphans, Jun, perfect his dives: It’s when we’re at the pool that I feel closest to Jun—when he’s diving, his body nearly defenseless in only a swimsuit, twisting itself into the laid-out position, the pike, the tuck. She might be a watcher, lingering wraithlike on the edges of Jun’s life, but she is not a passive observer. She is obsessed with Jun.

Within the Light House, with its trapdoors and ceaseless noise, Aya is driven by a parallel obsession: inflicting cruelty on one of the orphaned infants. Her obsession with Jun is unrequited, but Aya satisfies this second desire with a terrible, escalating intensity. Yet at the end, Jun provides a sort of reciprocity. We learn that he has, in fact, been able to see past Aya’s surface; he has grasped what others have not. Jun understands all too well what might be lurking under those trapdoors, at the end of those shadowed halls.

Caretaking roles gone wrong is a recurring theme in Ogawa’s fiction. They become a study in power dynamics warped by morbid curiosity and experiments in harm. In Pregnancy Diary, the narrator also lives with her family—her sister and her brother-in-law—but exists, as a single woman, on the edges of their world. The unpredictable weather of the sister’s pregnant body—the violent morning sickness; the ravenous devouring of food when hunger returns; sudden, urgent cravings for loquat sherbet and grapefruit jam—sweeps through the narrator’s life like a haunting.

She becomes fixated on her sister’s pregnancy even as she remains unsure of how to navigate this new development: I wasn’t quite sure congratulations were appropriate for a baby who would be born to my sister and her husband. I looked up ‘congratulate’ in the dictionary: it said, ‘to wish someone joy.’ Her obsession is reflected in the novella’s form; each section begins with a time stamp—December 30 (Tuesday), 6 weeks + 1 day—that tracks the progression of the pregnancy.

The narrator’s sister is a patient at the M Clinic. As children the two of them often snuck onto the clinic grounds to play: to roll around in the carefully tended lawn, to peer through the clinic windows. On occasion, they would spot women in thick bathrobes on the third floor—possibly new mothers. For the narrator, her sister is an inscrutable as these distant women once were. She observes the pregnancy with a voyeuristic detachment, at once obsequious (when the sister is overcome by morning sickness the narrator stops cooking food in her presence) and undermining. The narrator starts making vats of grapefruit jam—which her sister devours—despite reading that imported grapefruits have been treated with harmful pesticides: I stared into the pot, wondering how much PWH it contained. Under the fluorescent light, the jam reminded me of a chemical, something in a clear bottle, perfect for dissolving chromosomes. In Ogawa’s hands an ordinary action—one sister cooking for another—becomes freighted with menace and unease.

In the final novella, Dormitory, the narrator secures a room in her old college dorm for her cousin despite the Manager telling her that in some peculiar way the dormitory seems to be disintegrating. Her husband has left for a job in Sweden, and she is to follow. He keeps sending her to-do lists in preparation for her departure, but they are ignored. She has, like the two other narrators, become an outsider in her own life. She is not planning to stay in Japan, but she is not exactly taking the required steps to leave. She is suspended in the liminal: My life, too, seemed to be drifting in circles, as if caught in the listless season.

The narrator returns to the dormitory periodically to visit her cousin, but he is never around. Instead, she reconnects with the Manager. He is a triple amputee, and has always gotten along well enough, but age has taken a grim toll. Here the narrator makes genuine attempts at care. She comes to the dormitory bearing pies and cookies; when the Manager becomes too weak to move, the narrator brings medicine to his bedside, feeds him bits of cake. From the outside, it is clear to the narrator that the dormitory has aged, but inside she finds that everything was strangely unchanged. Visits become an anchor in an uncertain moment in her life; she retreats into the past to avoid a looming future: the move to Sweden, the task lists her husband keeps sending over. Some of these tasks are practical, others comically draconian: Go jogging every day. (You need to be in shape—it’s damp and cold here.)

Instead of preparing for the impending move, the narrator is drawn back to the dormitory again and again, despite the physical structure being in steep decline: There was something deep and weary about the silence that hung over the place, something almost sinister that could not be explained away by the fact that it was spring break and the residents would be absent. As it turns out, the narrator’s cousin is now the only boarder. The Manager reveals that the emptiness is likely because he was a person of interest in the disappearance of a young man who once lived in the dormitory.

This reveal casts the dormitory and the manager in an eerie, unsettling light. The narrator investigates but struggles to find information that clarifies. She and the Manager even look inside the missing boarder’s room, in case a clue has been missed, but she finds that it is perfectly ordinary. As with The Diving Pool, there appears to be something impossible to grasp about this dormitory.

The aura of mystery intensifies when the narrator finds that her cousin never seems to be around—has he gone missing too?—and that the tulips outside the Manager’s window are turning unusually bright colors. She learns that the Manager and the missing boarder planted the tulips together, an event the Manager describes in rapturous detail. What has really become of the missing student and the narrator’s cousin? Why do the dormitory and the Manager seem to be crumbling in parallel, as though locked in a synergetic fate? A mysterious humming sound increases until the novella reaches its surreal crescendo.

The Diving Pool is the first book of Yoko Ogawa’s to be translated into English, and it remains a perfect introduction to Ogawa’s spectacularly singular and haunting body of work. The novellas approach the edge of psychological horror, but ultimately remain beautifully uncategorizable. Ogawa’s genius is in illuminating the strangeness and the hunger that churn under the placid surface of a life, the secret violences that exist within ordinary citizens, the surreal torques to reality that might well be awaiting us just around the corner.

THE DIVING POOL

It’s always warm here: I feel as though I’ve been swallowed by a huge animal. After a few minutes, my hair, my eyelashes, even the blouse of my school uniform are damp from the heat and humidity, and I’m bathed in a moist film that smells vaguely of chlorine.

Far below my feet, gentle ripples disrupt the pale blue surface of the water. A constant stream of tiny bubbles rises from the diving well; I can’t see the bottom. The ceiling is made of glass and is very high. I sit here, halfway up the bleachers, as if suspended in midair.

Jun is walking out on the ten-meter board. He’s wearing the rust-colored swimsuit I saw yesterday on the drying rack outside the window of his room. When he reaches the end of the board, he turns slowly; then, facing away from the water, he aligns his heels. Every muscle in his body is tensed, as if he were holding his breath. The line of muscle from his ankle to his thigh has the cold elegance of a bronze statue.

Sometimes I wish I could describe how wonderful I feel in those few seconds from the time he spreads his arms above his head, as if trying to grab hold of something, to the instant he vanishes into the water. But I can never find the right words. Perhaps it’s because he’s falling through time, to a place where words can never reach.

Inward two-and-a-half in the tuck position, I murmur.

He misses the dive. His chest hits the water with a smack and sends up a great spray of white.

But I enjoy it just the same, whether he misses a dive or hits it perfectly with no splash. So I never sit here hoping for a good dive, and I am never disappointed by a bad one. Jun’s graceful body cuts through these childish emotions to reach the deepest place inside me.

He reappears out of the foam, the rippling surface of the water gathering up like a veil around his shoulders; and he swims slowly toward the side of the

Reviews for The Diving Pool

[JC lynch · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Have I read the same three stories? I rarely feel compelled to leave a negative review. Perhaps never, in fact. Sure, I often don’t like a book but I can’t recall ever feeling an immediate need to leave a one star review

[Goo Hara · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting stories of quiet anger and irrational fears. I don’t know how to feel about them.

[edwinbcn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The diving pool is a collection of three short stories of the Japanese author, Yoko Ogawa. In each of the three stories there is a decided preponderance of food and on the human body. Somewhat comparable to the chute in French novels, that is to say an unexpected turn, each story in The diving pool is characterised by a sinister twist.The first story, "The Diving Pool" is perhaps the most beautiful. The descriptions of the male swimmers' body are quite erotic. The twist in the story is surprising, and makes the reader wonder with what pre-meditation or deliberation the act of kindness, or generosity was made. The casualness of the description suggests impulse, but the accusation at the end seems to see through that innocense.The second story, "Pregnace Diary" seems to build up too slowly. This story has a much stronger sense of intentional malice, and the scope of the cruelty is determined in the mind of the reader, whether it is limited to physical pain or permanent deformation.In the final story, "Dormitory", the physique of one of the characters is somewhat absurd. This story is perhaps strongest in building up suspense.All three stories in The diving pool are highly original in the twisted outcome and the way the body and food are connected. The main theme of each of the story is love, although not in the usual relations of lovers. The stories are easy to read and enjoyable.

[literaryfeline · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was my first experience reading this author. I have had this little slip of a book sitting on my shelf for quite a while now, but am just now getting to it. I have mixed feelings about each of the stories. The first with the same title as the collection, The Diving Pool, about a girl with a crush on her foster brother, took me by surprise in the cruelty of the main character. She is the only child to parents who run the Light House, an orphanage. She has seen children come and go from the home, never quite feeling the sense of family life—or that of a home—she wishes she could have. Something normal. She is lonely and bitter. And at times jealous. Jun, the boy she has a crush on, has lived at the Light House for a number of years, the two growing up together in a sense. As Aya secretly watches Jun, sneaking into the pool where he dives every day, observing him at home and plotting to run into him at various times where they can be alone, she does not realize that Jun is also aware of her. He sees how she treats others and knows she visits the pool where he dives. I was satisfied with the way this story was wrapped up, but overall found it disturbing and at times difficult to stomach.

The second story titled Pregnancy Diary was interesting to say the least. An unmarried woman is living with her sister and her husband. She keeps a diary of her sister’s pregnancy, noting the moment the pregnancy was announced to her sister’s behavior and habits during the pregnancy. The woman records her own feelings of discontent and even disgust and eventual retaliation. The story takes a dark turn, just as the first one did, and the reader cannot help but wonder what is real and what isn’t. Not to mention what it is behind the disturbing thoughts and actions of the narrator.

The final story in this trilogy of novellas, Dormitory, is about a woman waiting for word from her husband about their pending move out of the country. She is feeling restless and lonely when approached by a young cousin setting off to college. He needs a place to stay, and she recommends the old dormitory in which she had once stayed. When she first takes her cousin to meet the landlord of the building, I could not help but feel sorry for the landlord. Armless and with one-leg, he has managed to get along on his own for many years, and yet it is clear he is lonely and his health his beginning to fail. The young wife returns to the dormitory under the guise of wanting to visit her cousin (who is never there), and often falls into conversation with the landlord. He tells her the story of a missing student, the subsequent police investigation, and the decrease in interest in his dormitory by students that followed. The story then takes a weird turn, which I have come to expect from Ogawa. Would this turn into a mystery to be solved or a horror story? I wasn’t sure. The ending was a surprise, and I am still not sure what to make of it.

I imagine each reader could take something different away from these three stories. There is a lot left open for interpretation. When all is said and done, my favorite is probably the first story, even despite how disturbed I was by it, only because I seemed to have a better handle on what that story was about. Did I like this collection? I am not sure I can say yes. Not exactly. These three stories will definitely stay with me awhile though. Haunting, indeed.

[seriousgrace · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Here is what you need to know before you dive into Ogawa's work. At the height of tension the story ends. Period. If you don't care for cliffhangers you should make up your own endings or just don't read Diving Pool at all. It's that simple. Ogawa's writing is like a subtle psycho-killer movie. Instead of the monster being front and center, there is absolutely nothing tangible to confront. The hairs on the back of your neck stand up, not because a blood-dripping ghoul is staring you down, but because there is nothing to see. The darkness is a wisp of toxic smoke, a hint of danger darting in the corners of your periphery. In Ogawa's stories it is what isn't being said that is far scarier than the certainty. In the title story Jun admits he is aware of the protagonist's cruelty. Then what? You don't know what happens next. In "The Pregnancy Diary" a sister gives birth to a child who may, or may not, have a birth defect. In the last story, "The Dormitory" a cousin hasn't been seen for days and the manager of his dormitory always has an excuse for his absence. After you have read these stories you are left without resolution and without resolution your imagination questions the reality.

[Manuel1960 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's a very curious book, short and at first not appealing, but as the pages go by, at least I couldn't stop reading it. I have read three books by the author and they all seemed very good to me. I recommend them to everyone. (Translated from Spanish)

[bookconcierge · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The subtitle calls them “three novellas”, but none is longer than 56 pages, so they are more accurately categorized as short stories. Regardless, I really enjoyed this collection; each was very different from the other two, but all dealt with relationships. It is the kind of literary fiction I love.

In the title story, a lonely teenager has a secret crush on her foster brother and spends time each day watching him practice his dives at the school pool. As she contemplates this infatuation, we learn more about the family and how she feels set apart, not only at school but at home.

Pregnancy Diary is NOT the diary of a pregnant woman, but rather of that woman’s sister. The narrator, who lives with her sister and brother-in-law, records how her sister feels about her pregnancy, and how it impacts everyone in the household. There is a rather other-worldly feel to this narrative, and the ending makes me wonder if the whole thing is a dream.

In the final story, The Dormitory, a young woman tries to help her cousin find accommodations at the university, suggesting the same building she stayed in when she was in school. It’s somewhat dilapidated but the price is right. What begins as a routine story, however, evolves into a horror tale of sorts. Where is her cousin? What is that dark spot on the ceiling? What happened to all the other tenants? My heart was in my throat as she gathered her courage to investigate further.

[megantron-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I first encountered Ogawa years ago when I read her short story "The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain" in the New Yorker. That story was wonderfully atmospheric and dreary: a beautiful little piece that stayed with you. The novellas (can they even be called that? they're more like short stories) in "The Diving Pool" are similarly atmospheric but unlike "Cafeteria", they're instantly forgettable. There's something quietly sinister about the stories, but tbh they're just not that interesting or substantive. The last story ("The Dormitory") is engaging and creepy, but despite its excellent premise, the ending is a huge let-down. Don't get me wrong-- I think Ogawa is a good writer, but this collection is SO short. A larger collection might have featured some stronger stories and a more balanced vision.

[thebookjunky · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the second book I have read by this leading Japanese author. After recently reading her wonderful book “The Housekeeper and the Professor” I started looking for her other translated works.
This is a collection of 3 novellas, all marked by her simple elegant prose. My favourite was the title story, about a teenage girl whose religious parents run a home (the ‘Light House’) for orphans and abandoned children. She feels out of sync with her family and her home. “Sometimes, as I approach, the Light House appears fixed and acute, while I, by contrast, feel vague and dim. At other times, I feel almost painfully clear and sharp, while the Light House is hazy. Either way, there is always something irreconcilable between the house and me, something I can never get past.” She has a crush on one of the teenage boys in her home with whom she has grown up. “I was the only one who had seen the expressions on his face at these moments, and I kept those images locked away like a bundle of precious letters.” He is a diver, and she loves to watch him from the corners and shadows. She feels closest to him, there at the pool. She is lonely and alienated from her family. She describes her voluble mother: “Particularly talkative during dinner, she was not one to cast about for topics that would include everyone, preferring to talk about herself and her interests from the moment we sat down until the meal was over. As she would grow increasingly excited and out of breath, I often wondered whether she in fact hated herself for talking so much. … Her lips were like two maggots that never stopped wriggling, and I found myself wanting to squash them between my fingers.” The reader starts to feel sympathy for her, but then is brought up short by sprays of thin strands of cruelty. Ogawa keeps gently pushing the reader along with her descriptions that make you stop and look again. “…along the way the knot of people who left the station with me unravels and fades away with the sunlight.” and “Sunlight covered the ground like a shower of gold dust.”
In “The Pregnancy Diary” the descriptions of the emotions, the morning sickness, and cravings of pregnancy were deftly drawn and twisted a bit, the result slightly oddly funny, or funnily odd, and even a bit touching.
I initially thought this collection was about a 3 to 3 ½, but in re-reading parts of them, and thinking again about them, trying to puzzle them out (because they are all a bit odd and sometimes a tad creepy), I find her writing is definitely growing on me, and I’d give it a 4. I’m on the lookout for another one by her.

[boredgames · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

profoundly disturbing and effortlessly chilling. useful for understated descriptions and cultural indicators without being heavy-handed

[tercat-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Definitely strange. The writing is simple. The stories are creepy. I can't say I like them, exactly, though they certainly leave an impression. I think I liked the last story the best.

[Rockjas 666 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The bus stopped in the immaculate snow of the safety zone. The door opened with a hiss, as if taking a deep breath, and invited us to enter the warmth of its belly. (Translated from Spanish)

[Inuki · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It is a very short but very interesting story, showing the perspective of a younger sister regarding her older sister's pregnancy. It is fascinating how the development of the gestation is portrayed, and as the story progresses, we see the changes in the characters and their point of view. It becomes entertaining, sentimental, and sometimes a bit bittersweet. (Translated from Spanish)

[stephanyT · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A short reading that shows, in an unconventional way, how the little sister of a pregnant woman describes the weeks of pregnancy. At first, it is entertaining to read, but then it becomes a bit creepy as the story unfolds. (Translated from Spanish)

[Odel · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Enigmatic, intimate, intriguing, and at the same time meticulous with a slight oriental sensuality. (Translated from Spanish)

[genolgra · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Stunning. Yoko Ogawa is an incredibly evocative writer, and Stephen Snyder does brilliant job with the translation. All three stories in this novella were elegantly written and just a little disturbing.

[phoibee-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

3.5 stars
Japanese writers have skills for making the simple and mundane things interesting and poetic. I have no idea what to expect with this book but it did not disappoint me. The stories do not contain complicated scenes but the turning points of it are remarkable. Each stories draw feelings. One more thing, it is absurd and awry.

My reactions based on the novellas:

The Diving Pool
Uh-oh..
I did not expect that will happen.

Pregnancy Diary
Oops.
I had the instinct how it will end but I hoped for another one.

Dormitory
Whaaaat.
I expect something cruel or absurd things to happen. idk lol.
If you don't like stories without conclusions, this is not for you.

[suesbooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

These three novellas were so well written. The description provided was so on target. Just enough information was provided to present a very uncomfortable story. The length of each encouraged me to think about each story, and why what happened happened. Also, the length let me draw many of my own conclusions.

[seeword · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is a collection of three novellas, originally published separately.

The Diving Pool is a well-constructed story, with a good balance that builds nicely to the climax. It works very well as a coming of age story.

The second story, Pregnancy Diary, bored me. Something very early on in the story telegraphed the ending to me. I really did not care to go through all that it took to get there. I tried hard not to skim.

Dormitory, the last of the three, was also the least of the three. It in the vein of stories by Saki H.H. Mu

[njmom3 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This is the third book I have read by the author. The first, The Housekeeper and the Professor, is a beautiful story with compelling characters. The second, Hotel Iris, was a bizarre and disturbing story with compelling characters. This book is a set of three novellas. I found it just bizarre and disturbing. I did not even find the characters compelling. So, I really did not enjoy it at all.

[birdsam0610 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I’ve often been tempted to try Yoko Ogawa’s books – my work colleague has repeatedly told me that The Housekeeper and The Professor is a must read and I’ve picked up her books in bookshops many times, yet put them back due to price. I was pleasantly surprised that my local library had a copy of The Diving Pool not only on the shelf but in a condition that suggested nobody’s lunch had ever been spilled on it! (Always a bonus).

The Diving Pool contains three novellas and can easily be read in a day. The first story, The Diving Pool, is about a girl who lives with many foster brothers and sisters. Every day, she watches her foster brother practise diving. Unfortunately, she is not as nice to her other siblings…

The second story, The Pregnancy Diaries, is a diary of a young woman living with her sister and her brother-in-law. The diary starts as the sister announces she is pregnant, but the sister has all sorts of strange things going on…

The final story, Dormitory, is about a young woman about to depart for Sweden. She reminisces to her cousin about her college days in a dormitory. He goes to live there when he starts college, but mysterious things are happening. The caretaker is a triple amputee and the students are disappearing…

All three stories are written beautifully and sparsely, leaving you to make up your own mind to what may have actually happened. All facets of human nature are laid bare from jealousy to cruelty. There’s an element of the gothic or horror to each story. When trying to explain this book to a friend, her response was ‘you read weird stuff’ but I think Japanese literature is a lot more brutally honest in its assessment of the human psyche.

I look forward to reading one of Ogawa’s novels soon.

Read it if: you enjoy the slightly creepy and can handle people doing strange things.

[cait86 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A friend sent me Yoko Ogawa's The Diving Pool after I read and enjoyed The Housekeeper and the Professor, a sweet novel about a woman and her son, and their unique relationship with a mathematics professor. This book, The Diving Pool, is a group of three novellas, and it is so different from [The Housekeeper and the Professor] that it is difficult to believe that they are by the same author.

The first novella, The Diving Pool, is about a teenage girl who falls in love with her step-brother. She watches his diving practice everyday after school, slipping out at the end before he can see her. At first this seems like a cute first crush, but things soon take an obsessive turn.

The second novella, Pregnancy Diary, is told throught he diary of a young woman living with her pregnant sister and brother-in-law. Again, things start out rather normally, but soon become disturbing.

The third novella, Dormitory, is about a woman who returns to her college residence years after her graduation. This dorm has fallen into disrepair, and the narrator is sucked into the rather sinister life of the crippled Manager of the building.

Ogawa's prose (and the work of her translator) is beautiful. She is a master at creating a mood - all of these stories made me feel rather creeped out - and at exploring the inner workings of the human mind. Her prose is detailed, yet sparse; she is an author who knows how to get the most out of just a few words.

So why, then, the low 2.5 star rating? Each of these stories has huge potential. They set up an obsessive character, give these characters destructive habits, and then right when the reader thinks something terrible is going to happen.... they end. Three times I felt my imagination kick into gear, felt as though some horriffic event was going to occur, and then each time I was let down. Nothing happened. These stories all had such potential, but Ogawa never took that last step. She made the horrible mundane, or just simply avoided the implecations of her characters' actions.

Don't let this book be your only attempt at Ogawa's bibliography - The Housekeeper and the Professor was very good, and I will definitely search out more of her books.

[akeela_8 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I didn’t love this slim volume with three short stories, unfortunately. The writer, and characters, seemed obsessed with gooey and yucky things like the following typical snippet of conversation:

“Doesn’t the sauce on the macaroni remind you of digestive juices?” she murmured. I ignored her and took a sip of water. “So warm and slimy? The way it globs together?” and on and on, in the same vein.

It was a bit icky and creepy, but one has to give Ogawa her due. The last story read like a thriller and I literally found myself holding my breath while reading.

On the whole, I'm amazed at her ability to write something as beautiful as The Housekeeper + The Professor and then this almost nauseating set of stories, on the other extreme.

No recommendation for this one, but a hearty double recommendation for The Housekeeper + the Professor from me!

[milkyfangs · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Three eerie, beautiful 'novellas' (in terms of length, they seem more like short stories) which equally disturb and entrance.

[jimelkins · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[zerraweth · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Disturbing and mind-boggling set of stories that leaves one considering the darker inclinations in all of us.

[coolsnak3_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

not that eerie. not haunting at all. but definitely intriguing. maybe something is lost in translation? i'd like to read the original text..at least of the diving pool, which i thought was the most focused of the three novellas.it's an interesting book on the whole. the stories fit well together as a collection. i'd like to read more by her.

[wandering_star_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A collection of three novellas, each of them about what happens when something disturbs the routine lives of their protagonists: a troubled teen has a crush on her foster-brother; a young woman notes her pregnant sister's mood changes; and another young woman starts returning to her student dormitory.

According to the book's blurb these stories are billed as 'eerie' and 'haunting' - and about how close to the surface our dark sides are. The third one did have the feel of a horror story, but other than that I didn't find this at all. They were certainly a bit grotesque, but I got bored quite quickly with the listless, detached protagonists.