The Diving Pool

From Akutagawa Prize–winning author Yoko Ogawa comes a trio of unsettling novellas that explore love, motherhood, fertility, and obsession — and the quiet cruelty that can hide within even the gentlest human acts.

In one story, a solitary teenage girl becomes fixated on her foster brother after watching him dive from a high board into a swimming pool, an innocent moment that sparks an obsession with far-reaching consequences.

In another, a young woman obsessively documents the daily moods of her pregnant sister, carefully tracking a pregnancy that may not exist at all — raising the question of whose reality is unraveling, the diarist’s or her sister’s.

In the final novella, a woman returns to her former college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo, a boardinghouse presided over by a strange and enigmatic triple amputee.

Spare, haunting, and quietly perverse, The Diving Pool is a darkly humorous and deeply disturbing collection about ordinary people confronting the unsettling depths within themselves.