The Diving Pool
by Yoko Ogawa
Translated by Stephen Snyder
What It’s About
The Diving Pool brings together three novellas: The Diving Pool, Pregnancy Diary, and Dormitory. On the surface, each story looks ordinary. A boarding house. A pregnancy. A young girl watching her foster brother dive. But Ogawa never keeps the surface for long. She has a way of tilting the floor just enough that you feel something off before you can name it.
All three novellas sit right at the edge of the familiar. They’re intimate, domestic, quiet, but the quiet hides something rotten beneath it. Ogawa lets you sit close enough to her characters’ private impulses that you start to feel uneasy, even when nothing explicitly horrific is happening yet.
This is not the gentle voice she uses in The Housekeeper and the Professor or Mina’s Matchbox. These stories go in a completely different direction.
What Stuck With Me
These novellas are dark, and the darkness feels sharper because of how elegantly she writes. Ogawa’s sentences are clean and controlled, which makes the acts of cruelty, obsession, and emotional detachment hit even harder. She doesn’t sensationalize anything. She just shows you people doing things they shouldn’t, and you feel it sink into you long after you close the book.
What stayed with me most was the ordinariness of the settings. A kitchen. A dorm. A pool. These are places where people live their regular days, and yet Ogawa turns them into spaces where something unsettling is waiting in the corner. The tension comes from how close everything feels. You’re right there in the small gestures, the quiet thoughts, the private rituals, and the slow unraveling.
None of the stories offer relief at the end. There’s no neat moral, no soft landing, just the awareness that you’ve witnessed something you probably shouldn’t have. That’s the part that refuses to leave.
Would I Recommend It
Yes, but only if you’re looking for something uncomfortable and disturbingly quiet. This is not a book for every reader. If you prefer hopeful or gentle stories, skip it. But if you like psychological unease, intimate violence, and that specific brand of literary dread Ogawa does so well, this collection is excellent.
My takeaway: Beautiful writing can make darkness feel even darker.
Where to Read It:
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If you like this book, you may also like these:
The Memory Police – a quiet, haunting story about memory, loss, and the slow erasure of the world around you.
The Housekeeper and the Professor – Ogawa’s gentle side; a tender story about connection, routine, and the small moments that shape a life.
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea – a cold, unsettling exploration of obsession and violence told through the eyes of a boy who believes in a world without compassion.
The Hole – an unsettling descent into suspicion, dread, and the strange emptiness beneath everyday life.
