The Diving Pool Three Novellas

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 teenaged 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 which 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.

Since 1988, Yoko Ogawa has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, and has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope. She lives in Ashiya, Japan.