the diving pool

I’m still in the mood to read small-ish books where weird or uncomfortable things happen, and I don’t know what that says about me, nor what the next thing says either: but I recently finished The Diving Pool and I really enjoyed how……cruel it was. It’s a collection of three short stories by Yoko Ogawa (who wrote The Memory Police! that book! oh my god, what a book), first translated back in 2008 by Stephen Snyder. It’s part of vintages Weird Girl series. And like, I haven’t gone around the houses telling everyone to read it, and there’ll be no Sunday text about it. but it’s still lingering two weeks on, because of how elegantly it wears its cruelty. like it’s been tailored to fit. three stories, and all of them low volume, domestic, and just a bit disturbing. do you know what it kind of reminded me of? remember when that woman was caught on camera walking down the road and putting the cat in the wheelie bin, and there was no hesitation. it’s that no hesitation — that’s how this book felt, like you had stopped the woman on the road a second later and you got to ask her, face to face, why the fuck did you just do that? It left me wondering why writers make these kinds of characters. Why we read them too. but i guess it’s because cruelty can become so natural, so writing about it is natural too.