The Diving Pool

October 29, 2007
In this first book-length translation into English, Japanese author Ogawa’s three polished tales demonstrate her knack for a crafty, suspenseful hook. Each is narrated in the listless, emotionally remote voice of a young woman, such as the high schooler of the title story whose infatuation with her foster brother, Jun, prompts her to obsessively observe his diving practice. As the daughter of religious parents who run an orphanage, Aya feels alienated from the workings of the so-called Light House and finds an outlet for her frustration in romantic fantasy about Jun as well as in tormenting—shockingly—an orphan baby. The underhandedly creepy “Dormitory” is narrated by a Tokyo wife who begins nursing the ailing, armless one-legged manager at her old college dormitory. The manager’s increasingly alarming tale of love for one of the renters, now vanished, enthralls the wife. “Pregnancy Diary” offers a bit of levity, narrated by a young unmarried woman whose rage toward her pregnant sister take the form of cooking her grapefruit jam prepared from fruit treated with a chromosome-altering chemical. Ogawa’s tales possess a gnawing, erotic edge.

February 1, 2008
The literary figure of the neurasthenic woman, about whose predicament Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote the psychological horror story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), returns in Ogawas novellas. Unlike her American forebear, she isnt closely watched, making for some deeply unsettling goings-on. In The Diving Pool, the world of the teenage only-child daughter of orphanage-maintaining parents centers on watching herfoster brother practice diving and on surreptitiously torturing the youngest orphan, a toddler. Pregnancy Diary seems to be a young womans journal of her sisters unconscionably long-drawn-out morning sickness, subsequent insatiable and peculiar appetite, and then delivery at the clinic she always assumed she would use but that is deserted when the diarist goes there to meet my sisters ruined child. A woman awaiting her husbands signal to join him abroad arranges for a college-entering cousin to live in her old Dormitory and falls into nursing the manager, a dying triple amputee. Theres nothing magical about these calmly realistic first-person narratives, yet at times each is as spine-tingling as a Stephen King creep show.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)