A review by jnzllwgr
The Diving Pool by Yōko Ogawa

4.0

I don’t read a lot of Japanese literature. I need to amend that post haste. In engaging with Ogawa, a female author, I became more aware of my white American male gaze. These stories are a gentle whisper of storytelling on your heart and mind. And yet, there is an uncanny valley. In part it’s a deft author telling stories of the inbetween-ness of things. In part, it is my mind failing to grasp the magnitude of the uncomfortable, tense malevolence that is expressed. The physicality of being male can typically place these types of emotions in outward, aggressive displays. Here, those same monumental feelings are more internalized and, thusly, can be overlooked, or discounted — I confess it happened to me. And after a few days of thinking on this, I realized that perhaps I’ve missed a subtley of this and other recently read female authors (Renata Adler, Emily St. John Mandel and Octavia Butler). This is the power of literature. Remaining open, one can play with ideas and feelings not immediately accessible. It doesn’t have to be reading W.S. Burroughs (who wanted to use language —almost like magick— to overturn society’s power dynamics) to grow ourselves into better people. That’s why things like DeSantis and book bans and Trump/Project 2025 are so dangerous, they want to curtail the access to the full potentiality of experience. They do not want individuals to be open and thoughtful and egalitarian. They want them in intellectually isolated tribes with moral convictions so profoundly rigid they lose their humanity. To clarify, Ogawa’s “whispers” have nothing to do with today’s shift to populism, oligarchs and strong men. Apologies if that feels like a digression. In short, the way the events unfold in these 3 short tales are *so* different than how my mind works, I almost didn’t see it, or understand just how incredible what was being placed on the page was. I realized it’s my own limits (and my hunch is that those limits are white, American and male), not the author’s talent. But that’s ok. Because one just needs to be open and looking for it. Once you see it, you see it everywhere.