NEAR Review: The Diving Pool, by Yoko Ogawa

About NEAR Reviews: One of the nicest things about reading romance is that it has awakened my interest in reading all kinds of books.  When I review a book that’s neither a romance, nor a book or author that the romance community has embraced (like Charlaine Harris or Sharon Shinn, for example), I’ll label it with NEAR, for Not Even A Romance.

Fun Factoid: This was a Reading the World 2008 title. In 1990, Yoko Ogawa won the Akutagawa Award, one of the most important awards for fiction in Japan. I love the short story form, and while I’m no expert in Japanese literature, I love Ryunosuke Akutagawa (two of whose stories were the basis for Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon).

Word on the Web:

Britain’s Independent, very positive

Masculine clarity has no place here. It is the irrational that comes naturally to Ogawa’s women. The narrators of “The Diving Pool” and “Pregnancy Diary” commit atrocious deeds – tormenting a toddler, possibly poisoning a pregnant woman – as if by reflex, barely aware not only of the consequences, but almost of the act. Rarely have first-person narratives been so opaque. This may be one source of their power to disturb. Is it possible to be a monster, all unknowing?

Booklit, Stewart, not so positive

“[That t]here’s much to appreciate here, and that Ogawa has a back catalogue ripe for translation, is reason enough to dive in, even if these three novellas are the shallow end.”

Japan Today,  Bryan Hartzheim (reprinted from Metropois Magazine) (this is the best positive review, IMO)

Ogawa’s prose calls to mind that of a Truman Capote or the later Junichiro Tanizaki, capable of pairing beautiful metaphor and vivid description with the coldest and most grotesque of human thoughts and behaviors.

The three stories are also unmistakably framed by Ogawa’s approach at an ironic interiority — ironic because, while the stories are presented in the first person by female narrators, remarkably little is revealed by their thoughts alone. Rather, we learn about them by the simultaneously minute and monstrous actions that they themselves barely register, not because they aren’t conscious of their cruelty, but possibly because they don’t realize — as Ogawa frequently questions — the incomprehensible reasons for how or why people treat and mistreat each other.

Pedestal Magazine, positive

Some of Ogawa’s language choices will startle. Few fiction writers make such unique choices and achieve so much by them.

Entertainment Weekly, B

Washington Post, Janice P Nimura (another excellent review)

Ogawa writes stories that float free of any specific culture, anchoring themselves instead in the landscape of the mind. Her hallucinatory, oddly barbed stories snag the imagination, and linger.

Amazon.com: 4 stars after 7 reviews

The Racy Romance Review:

The three stories in The Diving Pool were published in the early 1990s. The English translation by Stephen Snyder came out in January 2008. I first read Ogawa, who is a very prolific Japanese writer of novels and short stories, in the New Yorker, where Pregnancy Diary (full text at link), one of the novellas in this book, was first published in English (You get a lifetime subscription to the New Yorker when you get your PhD in the humanities. It comes with the secret handshake.).

On terminology: I am going to use “novella” and “story” interchangeably in this review. You can say novellas are 50 or more pages (this is how publishers see it), and short stories are – um – shorter, and you can point to other differences, like that conflict needs to be established right away in a short story but not in a novella, but I am going to blithely ignore all of that here, except to say that in (English) length these are novellas, but in the unresolved endings, they feel like short stories to me.

During a visit to my local library a few weeks ago, the beautiful cover of this collection caught my eye, and I took it home (maybe because I spend a lot of time in the winter poolside). It has taken me quite a while to finish this collection. It’s not long (each story is about 50 pages) but so disturbing that I needed recovery time between each one.

Here are brief reviews of each of the three novellas:

The Diving Pool

Aya, a teenager in suburban Tokyo, is obsessed with her adopted brother, Jun. Aya has been raised in the orphanage run by her birth parents, and feels, paradoxically, like the odd one out, the orphan herself. Jun is on the diving team at the high school, and watching him is the greatest, most secret joy in Aya’s life:

Sometimes I wish I could describe how wonderful I feel in those few seconds from the time he spreads his arms above his head, as if trying to grab hold of something, to the instant he vanishes into the water. but I can never find the right words. Perhaps it’s because he’s falling through time, to a place where words can never reach.

Aya is bitter and sad, overlooked and lonely, with a cruel streak and a deep desire for love and acknowledgment that is twisted into obsession and a sadistic desire for power over others. She’s lyrical and astute in her observations of others.

What I loved about this novella (and the other two) was the imagery. It’s poetical writing. Many of the images are grotesque, and often involved food used in very unusual ways. Here are just a few examples:

…I can never hear the words “family” and “home” without feeling that they sound strange, never simply hear them, and let them go. When I stop to examine them, though, the words seem hollow, seem to rattle at my feet like empty cans.

***

Her lips were like two maggots that never stopped wriggling, and I found myself wanting to squash them between my two fingers.

***

The tiny legs protruding from the elastic hems of her pants looked like past of smooth, white butter. Whether they are dark and blotchy, covered in a rash, or rippling with rings of fat, I am always fascinated by a baby’s thighs. There is something almost erotic about their defensiveness, and yet they seem fresh and vivid, like separate living creatures.

The imagery tells us a lot about Aya, and often about its subject. It’s not just there, but connected to the author’s subtle and vivid renderings of human psychology. There’s something very wrong with Aya, that she sees her mother’s lips and this innocent baby’s thighs, in this way.

I was drawn to this book in part because one of the reviewers on the back cover referred to it as “on the edge of the unspeakable”, and the touches of horror in the Sookie Stackhouse series, which I am now reading, have made me more interested in reading for the grotesque and horrific.

Aya ends up tormenting the baby whose thighs are described above. I was worried that baby torture would seem exploitative or just too much, but I was able to read those passages with relative ease. There were there for a purpose, and the purpose was met.

I wasn’t thrilled with the way the story ended: it seemed a bit moralistic for an author who had explored the human psyche with such complexity.

The Pregnancy Diary

In this story, the first person narrator, again a young single woman, lives with her pregnant sister and brother-in-law.  The cover copy suggests the pregnancy is a hallucination, but the text of the story did not suggest that to me at all.

Again, we have a narrator with a cruel streak: her sister packs on the pregnancy pounds thanks to the narrator’s constant grapefruit jam making, knowingly using imported fruits may contain toxins that harm developing fetuses.

In some ways this was even more awful to me to read about than the baby torture, because the narrator keeps preparing the jam for her sister after she discovers that it may harm the fetus.  It’s not even planful or emotional. It just … happens.

I like to think of evil as intentional (the fruit of human desire in some way). I guess this provides a source of hope that it can be deterred. In this novella, evil just drifts in to the scene without forethought or hope for gain. I found it terrifying.

The sister experiences two very common pregnancy symptoms: morning sickness, and, later, weight gain. Ogawa manages to make both commonplaces seem grotesque and unique.

Again, thanks to Ogawa, I will never look at ordinary food the same way again:

Half-cooked egg dripped from her fork like yellow blood. My brother-in-law was eating slices of kiwi. I can’t stand kiwi — all those seeds make me think of little black bugs, and the kiwi this morning was particularly ripe and soft. Beads of sweat had collected on the surface of the butter.

Ogawa takes things that are supposed to be supreme human comforts: food and pregnancy, and turns them monstrous.

The way all of the characters relate to the pregnancy is so unusual. In so many ways, pregnancy is terrifying and absurd.  At one point, the narrator tells us:

My sister and her husband never talk about the baby in front of me. They act as if there’s no connection between the pgregnacy and the fact that there’s a baby in her belly. Which may explain why it has no concrete existence for me.

***

[The pregnant sister is speaking] I’m filled with sadness, and I realize what scares me the most is the thought of meeting my own baby.

This narrator is even harder to read than the narrator of The Diving Pool. She works at a supermarket, she seems to love her sister (in her unique way), and that’s about all we know. Is the author telling us something about late twentieth century Japanese suburban ennui?

The ending of this once, while ambiguous, was much more satisfying to this reader.

Dormitory

In this story, a young woman whose husband is in Sweden visits her old college dormitory with her younger cousin. There she meets the Manager, a triple amputee, and learns that the dorm has been suffering declining occupancy since a student disappeared from it months prior.

This narrator is as depressed and low affect as the others, but easier to sympathize with. She also suffers from a curious detachment. She can’t picture Sweden, where she is to join her husband soon — it’s too abstract and different. Her days are “swollen into an indistinguishable mass by the damp weather.” She feels “like a silkworm in a cocoon.”

Her husband sends her a list of practical tasks to accomplish, like getting her passport in order, and it baffles her:

Somehow I couldn’t really understand what he was trying to say. The words — “market”, “squirrel”, “passport”, “moving company” — were like obscure philosophical terms.

She becomes attached to the Manager, tending to him, and this little world of the collapsing dormitory seems so at odds with her husband’s in Sweden that she can hardly believe they both exist.

Ogawa pays a lot of attention to bodies (lovingly, obsessively, hatefully, monstrously) and the Manager’s body is attended to with a level of detail that I felt bordered on exploitative.

The ending of this one was not at all what I expected.  The way it connected nature, insects, horror, and food, with fear, hope, mystery, wonder, and cruelty was pure Ogawa.

You know how, in romances, you get smells, sounds, touch, taste, sights — and it’s all usually fairly positive if not downright enticing? Ogawa is like the anti-romantic author in the ways she shows us how our senses oppress and mystify us.

I can’t say I enjoyed this book, but I loved it. I think I’ll assign Pregnaancy Diary in one of my feminist theory courses where I teach Julia Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater”, or in my ethics and fiction course.