The Diving Pool

by Yoko Ogawa (Author), Stephen Snyder (Translator)

New
Paperback
2009
$10.70

Beautiful, twisted and brilliant - discover Yoko Ogawa. A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster-brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool - sparking an unspoken infatuation that draws out darker possibilities. A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, but rather than a story of growth the diary reveals a more sinister tale of greed and repulsion. Driven by nostalgia, a woman visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo. There she finds an isolated world shadowed by decay, haunted by absent students and the disturbing figure of the crippled caretaker.

Synopsis

Beautiful, twisted and brilliant - discover Yoko Ogawa. A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster-brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool - sparking an unspoken infatuation that draws out darker possibilities. A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, but rather than a story of growth the diary reveals a more sinister tale of greed and repulsion. Driven by nostalgia, a woman visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo. There she finds an isolated world shadowed by decay, haunted by absent students and the disturbing figure of the crippled caretaker.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 176
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 02 Apr 2009
ISBN 10: 0099521350
ISBN 13: 9780099521358
Book Overview: The first major English translation of one of contemporary Japan's most celebrated, award-winning authors.

Media Reviews

Written in haunting, spare, shimmering prose...punctuated by acts of casual violence and vindictive spite. Profoundly unsettling, magnificently written and instantly memorable, these stories vindicate [Ogawa's] status as one of Japan's greatest living writers * Guardian *
Yoko Ogawa's British debut is inexcusably belated....Ogawa is a conspicuously gifted writer... Not a word is wasted, yet each resonates with a blend of poetry and tension... mesmerising... To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state tinged with a nightmare, and her stories continue to haunt. She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance. She should be discovered in Britain, and this book must surely begin the process * Guardian *
The three Japanese novellas in The Diving Pool are both creepy and disturbingly lovely...spine-tingling uncertainty surfaces throughout the haunting prose * Dazed & Confused *
A fine collection of three queasily unsettling novellas... She invests the most seemingly banal domestic situations with a chilling and malevolent sense of perversity, marking her out as a master of subtle psychological horror * Daily Telegraph *
An intriguing trilogy of exquisitely sketched stories... Elegant, intelligent, quietly disturbing * Financial Times *

Author Bio

Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award including the Akutagawa and the Tanizaki Prizes. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope. Her works include The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris and Revenge.