Translation
Of the dark and weird
K. KUNHIKRISHNAN
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Sinister images of brutality juxtaposed with scenes of everyday life and situations makes for a disturbing book.
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The Diving Pool, Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder, Harville Secker, Random House, £8.99
The author is one of the most celebrated contemporary writers in Japan, bagging the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1990 and Tanizaki Prize in 2004. She has an oeuvre of 20 books, but it is for the first time that her book has been translated into English, though her stories have been published in magazines like The New Yorker and Zoetrope. The three novellas are disturbing as beauty hides cruelty that gets demonstrated in the most unexpected form and time. Images of brutality are juxtaposed in a weird and sinister manner. Each well narrated and haunting novella, about love, obsession and dark humour, has an unpredictable twist of viciousness coupled with compassion. Can an adolescent girl torture a toddler? Can a loving sister gradually and sneakily poison her pregnant sister? The eeriness and disappearances are like those unexplained ones in the writings of Haruki Murakami. The stories evoke a disturbing vibration, without any narrative complexities.
Complex emotions
In the title story, “The Diving Pool” (Dibingu puru in Japanese), Aya, the teenage girl suffers alienation. The plot is about her erotic passion and disappointment. Her parents, who are pastors, run “Light House”, an orphanage where she is brought up along with the orphans. They do not treat her differently. She pines for freedom and watches her foster brother Jun, who practises diving. Aya knows every twist and turn of the muscles of Jun. The impossibility of her unfulfilled desires makes her angry, but she can not express it. When her parents leave Rie, the new toddler in the orphanage, to her care, she tortures the innocent child; the child is on the throes of death. Jun shocks her by revealing that he knows the truth. She is not repentant. It is a typical juxtaposition of the sublime along with revulsion and the complicated and dark nature of the difficult character, Aya.
Strange love
The “Pregnancy Diary” is structured as a diary written from December 29 to August 8, and reduces the nine months of pregnancy to a series of disconnected notes .The protagonist and her sister have lost their parents and the siblings grow up and are living together. The progress of pregnancy disgusts the sister, who observes: “her whole body is swelling before my eyes like a giant tumour”. Finding that her sister loves grape fruit jam after her initial months of nausea, the caring sister makes it in large quantities, ignoring reports of toxic pesticides in the fruits. There are lots of disjointed images like egg yolk dripping from a fork like yellow blood, and the resemblance of her sister’s chewing lips to the thighs of a runner. The excess feeding of grapefruit jam has its toll on the pregnant mother-to-be. The sister rushes in the end to meet her “sister’s ruined child”. The emotional wreckage lingers in the narration.
The third novella, “Dormitory”, is a bizarre one. A young and lonely wife revisits her old dilapidated dormitory, where she arranges for her nephew to live. The crumbling dormitory is run by a triple amputee. He has lost one leg and both the arms. The building induces a strange force on the lady, “a warm, rhythmic presence that seeped quietly into my skin”. She often returns to care for the dying manager while the nephew has strangely disappeared! The grotesque story is full of twists and turns and full of horror. There are many unanswered questions for the reader.
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