The Diving Pool

Synopsis

From Akutagawa Award-winning author, Yoko Ogawa comes a haunting trio of novellas about love, motherhood, fertility, obsession, and how even the most innocent gestures contain a hairline crack of cruel intent. A lonely teenaged 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 which 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 Pool" is a disquieting and, at times, darkly humorous collection of novellas about normal people who suddenly discover their own dark possibilities.