The Diving Pool: Three Novellas - Paperback

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by Yoko Ogawa (Author), Stephen Snyder (Translator), Laura Van Den Berg (Introduction by)

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 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 boardinghouse 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.

Author Biography

Yoko Ogawa's 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 she has won Japan's most prestigious literary awards. Her books include The Housekeeper and the Professor, Revenge, and The Diving Pool.

Stephen Snyder teaches Japanese literature at Middlebury College. His translations include works by Kenzaburō Ōe, Ryu Murakami, Natsuo Kirino, and Miri Yu.

Number of Pages: 192

Dimensions: 0.6 x 8.2 x 5.3 IN

Publication Date: July 01, 2025