The Diving Pool

By Ogawa Yoko

Translated by Steven Snyder

1990, Translated 2008

Picador

(Three Novellas)

In two of these novellas, Ogawa attacks fundamental societal expectations of women. But be forewarned: Ogawa is after more than pressure to marry and bear children. Writing in the same vein as Kono Taeko who shocked the reading public with the late 1990s short story “Toddler Hunting,” about a woman who loathes little girls and has a prurient interest in dressing and undressing little boys, Ogawa presents us with female protagonist with perverse sexual obsessions and a single-minded focus on bringing harm to siblings and innocent and even unborn children. The first, “The Diving Pool,” hearkens back to Rampo Edogawa, as the young protagonist spies on her adoptive brother and makes use of the underwater CCTV cameras to extend her hungry gaze even beneath the broken surface of the water. Unable to satisfy her longing to possess the beautiful body of Jun, whose name means “purity,” she turns her violence against a weak orphan. In Pregnancy Diary, a woman’s jealousy over her sister’s career, marriage, and pregnancy causes her to devise a plan to sabotage the viability of the fetus. In the last story, Dormitory, Ogawa seems to be investigating the themes of memory and loss that she will return to again in her novel The Memory Police. Possessed by a desire to revisit the decrepit building she lived in during her college years. She discovers that the structure is failing and that it has been some time since anyone rented rooms there. She is disturbed to discover that the building is somehow different than the way she remembered it; something about it seems uncanny, especially a dark stain that seems to be spreading across a ceiling. The only familiar presence in the building is the old landlord, a triple-amputee who puts her at ease, but also tells her a tale about a disappeared renter that propels her on an obsessive search for both the past and the missing student. Ogawa is a beautiful writer, and Steven Snyder’s translation is lyrical and rich in meaning. No wonder then that when the female characters reveal themselves for what they truly are, the visceral shock leaves us nauseated but unable to look away.

“One after the other, the divers come slipping into the water making their graceful arcs in front of the camera. I would like them to move more slowly, to stay longer, but after a few seconds their heads appear again above the surface.

Does Jun let his body float free at the bottom of the pool, like a fetus in its mother’s womb? 

How I’d love to watch him watch him to my heart’s content as he drifts there, utterly free.”