The Diving Pool

Written in haunting, spare, shimmering prose...punctuated by acts of casual violence and vindictive spite. Profoundly unsettling, magnificently written and instantly memorable, these stories vindicate [Ogawa's] status as one of Japan's greatest living writers

Written in haunting, spare, shimmering prose...punctuated by acts of casual violence and vindictive spite. Profoundly unsettling, magnificently written and instantly memorable, these stories vindicate [Ogawa's] status as one of Japan's greatest living writers

Yoko Ogawa's British debut is inexcusably belated....Ogawa is a conspicuously gifted writer... Not a word is wasted, yet each resonates with a blend of poetry and tension... mesmerising... To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state tinged with a nightmare, and her stories continue to haunt. She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance. She should be discovered in Britain, and this book must surely begin the process

The three Japanese novellas in The Diving Pool are both creepy and disturbingly lovely...spine-tingling uncertainty surfaces throughout the haunting prose

A fine collection of three queasily unsettling novellas... She invests the most seemingly banal domestic situations with a chilling and malevolent sense of perversity, marking her out as a master of subtle psychological horror

An intriguing trilogy of exquisitely sketched stories... Elegant, intelligent, quietly disturbing

Original, elegant, very disturbing... on the edge of the unspeakable

A welcome introduction to an author whose suggestive, unsettling storytelling speaks volumes by leaving things unsaid

Hard not to finish in one go, Yoko Ogawa's stories are perfect for spooky bedtime reading - and not-so-sweet dreams

Polished, original and strange. She reveals humour, menace, and humanity in a quietly explosive book

Her combination of the strange with the visceral elegantly conveys silent inner worlds of misery and pain

Yoko Ogawa (Author)
Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker , A Public Space and Zoetrope . Her works include The Diving Pool , The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris and Revenge. Her dystopian novel, The Memory Police , was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

Stephen Snyder (Translator)
Stephen Snyder is a translator and professor of Japanese Studies at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA.

He has translated works by Kenzaburo Oe, Ryu Murakami, and Miri Yu, among others. His translation of Natsuo Kirino’s Out was a finalist for the Edgar Award for best mystery novel in 2004, his translation of Yoko Ogawa’s Hotel Iris was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011 and The Memory Police was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020.