title: The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
author: Yoko Ogawa
description: In this first book-length translation into English, Japanese author Ogawa's three polished tales demonstrate her knack for a crafty, suspenseful hook. Each is narrated in the listless, emotionally remote voice of a young woman, such as the high schooler of the title story whose infatuation with her foster brother, Jun, prompts her to obsessively observe his diving practice. As the daughter of religious parents who run an orphanage, Aya feels alienated from the workings of the so-called Light House and finds an outlet for her frustration in romantic fantasy about Jun as well as in tormentingshockinglyan orphan baby. The underhandedly creepy Dormitory is narrated by a Tokyo wife who begins nursing the ailing, armless one-legged manager at her old college dormitory. The manager's increasingly alarming tale of love for one of the renters, now vanished, enthralls the wife. Pregnancy Diary offers a bit of levity, narrated by a young unmarried woman whose rage toward her pregnant sister take the form of cooking her grapefruit jam prepared from fruit treated with a chromosome-altering chemical. Ogawa's tales possess a gnawing, erotic edge. <i>(Feb.)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: Also by Yoko Ogawa
  
   _Revenge_
  
   _Hotel Iris_
  
   _The Housekeeper and the Professor_
  
   _The Diving Pool_
  
  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are
  the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
  resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely
  coincidental.
  
  Translation copyright © 2019 by Yoko Ogawa
  
  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a
  division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by
  Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Japan as
  _Hisoyaka na kesshō_ by Kodansha, Ltd., Tokyo, in 1994. Copyright © 1994 by
  Yoko Ogawa.
  
  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House
  LLC.
  
  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
  
  Names: Ogawa, Yoko, [date] author. Snyder, Stephen, [date] translator.
  
  Title: The memory police / Yoko Ogawa ; translated from the Japanese by
  Stephen Sny