The Diving Pool: Three Novellas [Paperback]

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 Poolis a disquieting and at times darkly humorous collection of novellas about normal people who suddenly discover their own dark possibilities.

Yoko Ogawa's fiction has appeared inThe New Yorker, A Public Space,andZoetrope.Since 1988 she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, and has won every major Japanese literary award. Her books includeThe Housekeeper and the Professor,Revenge, andThe Diving Pool.

Stephen Snyderteaches Japanese literature at Middlebury College. His translations include works by Kzaburo Oe, Ryu Murakami, Natsuo Kirino, and Miri Yu.

Discussion Questions

1. Food is not always a source of nourishment inThe Diving Pool often it plays a more malevolent role. In Pregnancy Diaries , the diarist imagines she is killing her sister's embryo by feeding her grapefruit jam with chromosome-altering pesticides; in Diving Pool, the narrator knowingly feeds a rotten cream puff to a little girl and sends hel£3