EX LIBRIS
VINTAGE CLASSICS
YOKO OGAWA
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 novel The Memory Police was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Her most recent book is Mina’s Matchbox.
STEPHEN SNYDER
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, and his translation of Yoko Ogawa’s Hotel Iris was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011.
A l SO b Y YOKO OGAWA
The Housekeeper and the Professor
Hotel Iris Revenge
The Memory Police
Mina’s Matchbox
YOKO OGAWA
THE DIVING POOL
TRANS l ATED FROM THE JAPANESE b Y
Stephen Snyder
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‘Diving Pool’ © Yoko Ogawa 1990 ‘Dormitory’, ‘Ninshin Karenda/Pregnancy Diary’ © Yoko Ogawa 1991
English translation copyright © Stephen Snyder 2008
The moral right of the author has been asserted
This edition published by Vintage Classics in 2025
First published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker in 2008
The Diving Pool first published in Japan by Fukutake Publishing Co., Ltd. as Samenai Koucha
Dormitory and The Pregnancy Diary first published in Japan by Bungei Shunju Ltd. as Ninshin Karenda.
English translation rights arranged with Yoko Ogawa through Japan Foreign-Rights Centre/ The Irene Skolnick Literary Agency
The English translation of Pregnancy Diary first appeared in slightly different form in the New Yorker in 2005. The English translation of The Diving Pool first appeared in Zoetrope in 2007.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library iSbN 9781529955712
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THE DIVING POOL
THE DIVING POOL
It’s always warm here: I feel as though I’ve been swallowed by a huge animal. After a few minutes, my hair, my eyelashes, even the blouse of my school uniform are damp from the heat and humidity, and I’m bathed in a moist film that smells vaguely of chlorine.
Far below my feet, gentle ripples disrupt the pale blue surface of the water. A constant stream of tiny bubbles rises from the diving well; I can’t see the bottom. The ceiling is made of glass and is very high. I sit here, halfway up the bleachers, as if suspended in midair.
Jun is walking out on the ten-meter board. He’s
wearing the rust-colored swimsuit I saw yesterday on the drying rack outside the window of his room. When he reaches the end of the board, he turns slowly; then, facing away from the water, he aligns his heels. Every muscle in his body is tensed, as if he were holding his breath. The line of muscle from his ankle to his thigh has the cold elegance of a bronze statue.
Sometimes I wish I could describe how wonderful I feel in those few seconds from the time he spreads his arms above his head, as if trying to grab hold of something, to the instant he vanishes into the water. But I can never find the right words. Perhaps it’s because he’s falling through time, to a place where words can never reach.
“Inward two-and-a-half in the tuck position,” I murmur.
He misses the dive. His chest hits the water with a smack and sends up a great spray of white.
But I enjoy it just the same, whether he misses a dive or hits it perfectly with no splash. So I never sit here hoping for a good dive, and I am never disappointed by a bad one. Jun’s graceful body cuts through these childish emotions to reach the deepest place inside me.
He reappears out of the foam, the rippling surface of the water gathering up like a veil around his shoulders; and he swims slowly toward the side of the pool.
I’ve seen pictures from underwater cameras. The frame is completely filled with deep blue water, and then the diver shoots down, only to turn at the bottom and kick off back toward the surface. This underwater pivot is even more beautiful than the dive itself: the ankles and hands slice through the water majestically, and the body is completely enclosed in the purity of the pool. When the women dive, their hair flutters underwater as though lifted in a breeze, and they all look so peaceful, like children doing deep-breathing exercises.
One after the other, the divers come slipping into the water, making their graceful arcs in front of the camera. I would like them to move more slowly, to stay longer, but after a few seconds their heads appear again above the surface.
Does Jun let his body float free at the bottom of the pool, like a fetus in its mother’s womb? How I’d love to watch him to my heart’s content as he drifts there, utterly free.
I spend a lot of time on the bleachers at the edge of the diving pool. I was here yesterday and the day before, and three months ago as well. I’m not thinking about anything or waiting for something; in fact, I don’t seem to have any reason to be here at all. I just sit and look at Jun’s wet body.
We’ve lived under the same roof for more than ten years, and we go to the same high school, so we see
each other and talk any number of times every day. But it’s when we’re at the pool that I feel closest to Jun— when he’s diving, his body nearly defenseless in only a swimsuit, twisting itself into the laid-out position, the pike, the tuck. Dressed in my neatly ironed skirt and freshly laundered blouse, I take my place in the stands and set my schoolbag at my feet. I couldn’t reach him from here even if I tried.
Yet this is a special place, my personal watchtower. I alone can see him, and he comes straight to me.
I pass the shops near the station and turn from the main road onto the first narrow street heading south, along the tracks. The noise and bustle die away. It’s May now, and even when I reach the station after Jun’s practice, the warmth of the day lingers in the air.
After I pass the park—little more than a sandbox and a water fountain—the company dormitory, and the deserted maternity clinic, there’s nothing to see but rows of houses. It takes more than twenty-five minutes to walk home, and along the way the knot of people who left the station with me unravels and fades away with the sunlight. By the end, I’m usually alone.
A low hedge runs along the side of the road. It eventually gives way to trees, and then the cinder-block wall, half covered with ivy, comes into view. In the places