In his Manifesto of Surrealism, André Breton writes that true surrealist writing is the expression of the functioning of thought. In its natural form, surrealist writing is a refusal of conformist functionality. He writes, “[t]his summer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass […] Existence is elsewhere.”
What is left after the swift erosion of realism, however, is the kind of “madness […] one locks up.” This madness is a central modality of the psychic automatism within surrealist writing. In literature, what non-traditionalist writing reveals is an uncommunicable essence of self in characterization. It is the secret one does not share, the projected act of violence upon a weaker being, or the repression of sexuality.
Such madness is none better exemplified by Yoko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool, a triptych of psychologically fraught and subversive stories. Each narrative points towards the simultaneous inner compulsivity and detachment in its central female figures, spurred (and nourished by) intense loneliness or ostracization. In The Diving Pool, female figures break through the confinement of the mundane domesticity to experience a surrealist mode of control. Recognized by the Akutagawa Prize in their original Japanese publication and written in a first-person—and through a distant—reported tone, The Diving Pool, Pregnancy Diary, and Dormitory recast the female voice as active, disruptive, and ever-shifting.
In the titular story, a young schoolgirl named Aya wrestles against the stifling lifestyle of her parents’ orphanage, known as the “Light House,” where she resides amongst dozens of foster siblings. Aya’s only respite is to secretly watch her foster brother, Jun, practice his diving after school every day, a desire which simultaneously feels “simple and terribly complicated” to Aya, who wants only to “gaze at Jun’s wet body” (5). Aya’s sexual voyeurism is neither condemned nor psychoanalyzed; instead, Aya sees her actions as neutral and necessary for her desired outcomes.
If this were a typical narrative centered on traditional femininity, Ava’s secretive nature could be used for psychological sublimation in the form of social acceptance, sexual fulfillment, or social mobility. However, Ogawa is not interested in traditional feminine or maternal markers; when Aya is asked to caretake one of the orphans, a toddler named Rie, she begins to sense “the erotic” in the child’s “defenselessness.” Curious as to the outcome and spurred by her own overwhelming loneliness, Aya begins to abuse Rie, whose tears she savors “like hands caressing […] in exactly the right places” (28).
The Diving Pool is a masterclass in imagistic writing; from Aya playacting breastfeeding Jun as a child by using the “opalescent” milk of a fig tree branch to the scene of Jun holding little Rie after food poisoning, her body “covered with pale pink spots” as if “growing pink mold” (11, 41), Ogawa’s prose remains grippingly vivid.
The novella’s ending leans into a discomfort and illegibility worthy of dark surrealism. Where a reader may cringe, Ogawa pushes forward, grappling more with the inner turmoil of her female protagonist and questioning if the “madness locked up” has a way of emerging eventually. Such subversion of expectations is a shared theme of these stories. Pregnancy Diary, for instance, operates through the diary of a nameless female narrator in her early twenties who documents her sister’s pregnancy through a numbed, reporter-like affect. The narrator focuses on her sister’s morning sickness, which the narrator says “clings to her like a wet blouse” (76).
At no point does Pregnancy Diary show the reader the hopeful result of pregnancy: the child. Instead, the narrator views her sister’s pregnancy as ambiguous, writing, “At the moment, I use the word ‘chromosome’ to help me remember that there’s actually a baby in there […] like a pair of butterfly cocoons lined up in a row” (78). This absence of a baby highlights the psychological impassivity the narrator feels. Soon, the narrator begins to insert herself into her sister’s morning sickness, first with typical foods and then with grapefruit jam, which she makes constantly despite the threat of it “destroying chromosomes” (96).
The storyline is framed through the depiction of the M clinic, a maternity hospital which, although in operation, is depicted as eerily empty in the memory of the narrator’s visit as a child. The empty rooms at midday. The “unintelligible letters printed on medical charts.” “The thin, twisting tube, dull silver fittings, and pear-shaped rubber bulb of the [blood pressure] cuff” (60). Those women isolated within maternal centers are described as “women at the windows” with “thick bathrobes” and “hair pulled up into ponytails” (61). These scenes evoke an unease in pregnancy—an assumed future for the two young girls, their position mirrored by the writing on the wall:
“A poster on the wall read ‘Position for use in treating breech presentation.’ In the picture, a woman in a leotard was curled up in a ball on the floor. She lay there in the yellowed poster, staring vacantly into the distance.” (61)
After her sister has her baby, the narrator returns to the M clinic, where she sees a woman in the window, who may or may not be her sister, who is “blinking—the way you blink when you’re close to tears” (104). It is then that the narrator hears the cries of an infant, whom she runs to meet through the bowels of the empty clinic: her sister’s “ruined child” (105).
In Pregnancy Diary, pregnancy is depicted as an absence of wholeness. Morning sickness, apathy, incommunicability. Extraction and excavation are keen motifs in Pregnancy Diary, from the narrator recalling the “collection of bottles arranged on an oval tray” of the M clinic with “no caps or seals, just glass stoppers” which she “felt an irresistible urge to pull out.” Or in the image of rain forming a “hollow area in the shape of a lima bean,” a “bean-shaped cavity” in which the narrator envisions a “wispy shadow” as a child.
Dormitory begins with an unsettling sound, a noise that emerges “suddenly and unpredictably” to the narrator, a middle-aged suburban housewife intent on fixing a patchwork quilt and who recalls her nights spent in a dormitory in college, a simple, three-story concrete building. The narrator connects the dormitory’s “quaking” or “throb” sound to her previous residence, which she associates with her previous life of singlehood six years before she met her husband, who has recently moved to Sweden and wants her to join him. Describing the sound of the space, she writes:
“I could feel traces of my life evening in the decaying concrete, a warm, rhythmic presence that seeped quietly into my skin […] I would hear it for the briefest moment whenever my thoughts returned to the dormitory. The world in head would become white, like a wide, snow-covered plain, and from somewhere high up in the sky, the faint vibration began” (110).
Soon after the sound reappears in her life, the narrator receives a phone call from her estranged cousin, who is entering university and needs a place to live. Reminded of her time in the dormitory, the narrator agrees to set up her cousin with her former landlord, the Manager, a middle-aged, triple amputee who lives in the dorms. The cousin is set up in the dormitory successfully, and the clock continues to tick on the narrator’s eventual move to Sweden; however, when weeks go by without a word from her cousin, the narrator begins to visit the Manager, who begins to relay details regarding the disappearance of a former resident.
The setting of the dormitory takes on a sepulchral impression when the narrator returns to it on her visits, when her cousin is off on a trip. She describes watching a hive of bees, still preoccupied by their insistent buzzing: “The thrumming, which had been muffled by the rain, became more and more distinct, filtering into my head like a viscous fluid seeping through the tubes of my inner ear” (152).
On her last visit, the narrator listens as the Manager recalls the movement of the disappeared tenant’s hands when planting tulips, “the pattern of his fingerprints, the pale veins, the warmth of his skin, the smell—everything” (159). She has not seen her cousin in months, and the unease over his disappearance draws parallels in the reminiscing of the Manager’s former tenant. When the Manager eventually falls asleep, the narrator once again hears the “steady hum” of the bees. She begins to feel puddles of liquid, and in the darkness, cannot make out what they are. She goes searching for them, now deep in her madness, towards her cousin’s apartment.
Domestic life is placed under a fine scope in The Diving Pool; the central tension is in how the characters’ homes are nests for instability and tension. Whether it is “The Light House” orphanage in The Diving Pool, the spotless home where no one is allowed to cook in the Pregnancy Diary, or the haunting half-space of a “disintegrating” apartment complex in Dormitory, Ogawa points the reader to question whether these female characters should be psychologically connected to the spaces in which they are socially constructed to hold domain.
Ogawa holds up a mirror of the madness within mundanity, the terrors of domestic life. In The Diving Pool, no space is sacred in a post-feminist world, even to the impassive spectator. One can never run far enough away from the home, however terrorizing; sooner or later, they will be forced to return to their circumstances.
Works Cited
- Breton, André. Manifesto of Surrealism. University of Michigan Press (Reprint). 1969.
- Ogawa, Yoko. The Diving Pool. Picador. 2025.
Jennifer Nessel is a writer from Pennsylvania. They are currently an MFA candidate in fiction at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. This review has been edited for length and clarity.
