Reading the World 2008: The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa

This is the twelfth Reading the World 2008 title we’re covering. (Almost half-way!) Write-ups of the other titles can be found here. And information about the Reading the World program—a special collaboration between publishers and independent booksellers to promote literature in translation throughout the month of June—is available at the official RTW website. There’s also a podcast discussing RTW available from World Books.

According to Contemporary Japanese Writers, Vol. 1:

Yoko Ogawa is one of the stars of Japanese literature who is anticipated to be “the next Haruki Murakami.” Of her works, over ten have been translated into French. In France, she is as popular as her predecessors Junichiro Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata, and Yukio Mishima.

The Diving Pool is her first title to be published in English, and came out from Picador earlier this year. (I reviewed it a few months back.) This is a collection of three novellas, including “Dormitory,” which was my favorite for its creepy, ambiguous quality. (Even the flap copy description for this story is great: “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.”)

Stephen Snyder is one of the best Japanese translators working today, and he did a marvelous job with this book. I know that before leaving Picador, Amber Quereshi signed on a few of Ogawa’s titles, all of which Snyder will be translating.

The next one—The Housekeeper and the Professor—is due out in October, which is written up in Contemporary Japanese Writers:

Hakase no aishita sushiki (The Gift of Numbers) marked a transformation within Ogawa. It is a tale about the kind and affectionate relationship between a math professor—whose memory lasts only eighty minutes as a result of injuries he sustained in a car accident—and his housekeeper and her child. A beautifully written masterpiece, it attracted an overwhelming number of readers in Japan. The warmth with which the author runs her eyes over these characters, and the delicacy with which she portrays them, succeeded in making Ogawa’s world into something more expansive and enchanting.

The title of hers that sounds most interesting to me though is Hotel Iris:

Fans were split on the sensual, sadomasochistic world inhabited by an old man and a girl in Hotel Iris. It also proved controversial when it was translated into French; even the well-respected newspaper Le Monde criticized it as being merely erotic. In the story, the girl feels sorry for the old man’s deteriorating body bound for death, and motivated by a certain sense of masochism, she gives herself to him.