The Diving Pool

three novellas by Yoko Ogawa / translated by Stephen Snyder // Picador

A haunting trio of novellas about love, fertility, obsession, and how even the most innocent gestures may contain a hairline crack of cruel intent. Spare, beautiful, and twisted, The Diving Pool is a disquieting and at times darkly humorous collection about normal people who suddenly discover their own dark possibilities.

• A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, taking meticulous note of a pregnancy that 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.

• The title story is about a lonely teenage girl who falls in love with her foster brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool, wishing that she was the water—a peculiar infatuation that sends unexpected ripples through her life.