The memory police by Yoko Ogawa- 1994- translated fom the Japanese by Stephen Snyder - 2019

 

The memory police by Yoko Ogawa- 1994- translated fom the Japanese by Stephen Snyder - 2019

The Japanese Literature Challenge 14 - Hosted by Dolce Bellezza 

January 1 to March 31. Japanese Literature Challenge 14

My prior posts for JL14 2021

1. “Peony Lanterns” a Short Story by Aoko Matsuda - translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton -2020 - a delightful story you can read online. Linked to traditional stories of Ghosts
2. Before The Coffee Gets Cold by TOSHIKAZU KAWAGUCHI -2020- an international bestseller

My first encounter with Yoko Ogawa was during Jl3 in March of 2010.

As of now I have posted on two additional novels by Ogawa, Hotel Iris and her most famous work The Housekeeper and The Professor as well as eight shorter works.  Like Memory Police, The Housekeeper and The Professor are centered on the consequences of memory failure.  The Housekeeper and The Professor is a realistic mode work about a man whose short time memory only extends back one day.  The Memory Police is a dystopic s/f work about a culture wide mandated memory lose.  Things people do not remember disappear.

The Memory Police takes place on an unnamed island where things are disappearing, starting with hats, ribbons  birds and roses.  Most people have no memory left of the disappered things, those who do are dealt with by the memory police.  The Menory Police are a Gestapo like organization.  The narrator is a novelist.  Her editor is being sought by The memory Police so she decides to hide him.  Gradually more and more things begin to disappear including human body parts.  Things get stranger as the plot  proceeds.

I found Tbe Memory Police very interesting.  We never have a clear idea of why this is happening, just a few speculative notions.

About the Author Yoko Ogawa’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, Granta, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Since 1988 she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction and has won every major Japanese literary award. She lives in Hyogo.

I Will next read for JL14 a noir novel THE LADY KILLER by Masako Togawa Translated by Simon Grove, first published in 1963.

The Tale of the House of Physics - A Short story by Yoko Ogawa - Translated by Ted Goossen

Home Page for The Japanese Literature Challenge 12 - #jlc12

A Very Illuminating Post on The House of Physics by A Bookish Way of Life

Works I Have So Far Read for The Japanese Literature Challenge 12

1. “Insects” - a Short Story by Yuchi Seirai, a post Atomic Bomb work,2012
2. The Great Passage by Shion Miura, 2011, a deeply moving work centered on the creation of a Japanese Language Dictionary 
3. "The Whale That Fell in Love with a Submarine" A Short Story by  Akiyuki Nosaka- 2003- translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori - 2015
4. “Bee Honey” - A Short Story by Banana Yoshimoto- 2000 - set in Argentina during the annual Mother’s March for Disappeared Children.
5. Killing Commendatore: A Novel by Huruki Murakami- 2017
6. The Master Key by Masako Togawa - 1962 - translated by Simon Grove
7. "The Elephant and its Keeper" - A Short Story by Akiyuki Nasaka- 2003. translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemari
8. The Emissary by Yoko Tawada - 2014 - translated by Margaret Mitsutani
9. “The Prisoner of War and the Little Girl” - A Short Story by Akiyuki Nasaka- 2003. translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemari. I did not post on this story.
10. “The Soldier and the Horse” - A Short Story by Akiyuki Nasaka- 2003. translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemari. I did not post on this story.

Yōko Ogawa is another great author I probably would have never discovered were it not for my participation in prior Japanese Literature Challenges.  I have posted upon two of her novels, The House Keeper and The Professor, probably her best known work, as well as  Hotel Iris.  Additionally I have read a few of her shorter fictions.  After reading the very insightful post on A Bookish Way of Life on a short story by Ogawa, “The House of Physics”, I was glad to find the work included in The  Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories.

As the story open the narrator, getting ready to retire from his thirty two year career at a publishing company is making a list of all the books he edited,some 135.  He reflects on his career.  He wonders how someone can write a beautiful book yet be a jerk.  He was never a big star editor, he tried to let his authors speak and stay out of their way.  The very first work on the list is The House of Physics, he cannot seem to recall who wrote the work.

He begins to think back to his childhood, seemingly a few years after the war, playing with his friends.   A mentally disturbed in her own world woman lives in the neighborhood, in an abandoned building that once housed The House of Physics.  No one knows anything about her life history, there are various speculations, but she is allowed to stay in the building.  In a very telling interlude, the boys find a dead weasel and give it a ceremonial burial.   

The boys, including the narrator begin to try to talk with the woman, who normally avoids all contact and conversation.  She tells them she was a novelist.  When they ask where her novels are, she tells them they were all destroyed in the war.  They just figure she is crazy.  One day he enters the building and finds her sick.  He discovered some written paged he cannot decipher.  She begins talking, tell a tell from an other universe.  

I do not wish to tell more of the plot.  Ogawa shows people are not always what they seem, how memories influx our consciousness.

This is a very good story. I look forward to reading more by Yoko Ogawa.

Mel u

"The Sea" by Yoko Ogawa (2006)

I have read and posted on several works by Yoko Ogawa  (Japan, 1962) including Hotel Iris and The House Keeper and the Professor,  her most famous work.   I have also read two collections of her interrelated short stories.  A couple of years ago I acquired a decent collection of 21st century Japanese short stories, including "The Sea" by Yoko Ogawa.  

Last January I participated in January in Japan, an event hosted by Tony's Reading List.  I was glad to see it is being done for a second year.  The first featured writer was Yoko Ogawa.  "The Sea" centers on a couple who intend to marry on a visit to the woman's parents.  He intends to ask her parents permission to marry their daughter.  This is not a dramatic action filled story.  It is a story with deeply subtle reflections of the relationships in the family.  In addition to the parents there is a very elderly dysfunctional grandmother, a twenty one year old son who the fiancé refers to as her baby brother.  During the evening meal, the grandmother asks when will the daughter and her fiancé be coming home, with them right at the table.  The brother sits next to the grandmother in silence and looks out for her.  

At night the boyfriend and the brother will share the brother's bedroom.  We see them kind of straining to figure out something to talk about.  The intrigue or mystery in the story centers on a strange musical instrument the brother has fashioned out of a fish bladder that can only be played next to the sea.

"The Sea" is an interesting insightful story.  I am glad I read it.

Here is the link to January in Japan -

http://januaryjapan.blogspot.com/2014/01/j-lit-giants-8-yoko-ogawa.html

Mel u

Hotel Iris: A Novel by Yoko Ogawa

Hotel Iris:  A Novel by Yoko Ogawa  (1996, 173 pages, translated by Stephen Snyder)

Yoko Ogawa  is a writer with a very subtle, powerful intelligence whose work I greatly admire.   I have previously posted on her most famous work, The Housekeeper and the Professor, a darkly cutting collection of short stories, Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales, and several longer short stories in her collection, The Diving Pool.  It would be difficult for me to say which if her works was my favorite but for sure Hotel Iris:  A Novel is the most disturbing.  It is disturbing not just for its subject matter, the severe sexual abuse and bondage an older man practices on a seventeen year old woman, but by our reaction to the  very graphic scenes.   Do we feel the proper moral indignation at the predatory sex or does our voyeuristic side enjoy them even wonder what it would feel like to be on either side of these scenes.

The novel is set in the Hotel Iris, located on a small Japanese resort and fishing island.   The hotel is run by Mari and her mother with the help of a maid.  It is a small place with only eight rooms and a kitchen.   The mother takes care of the books and Mari works the desk, deals with the guests, and does the cooking.    She and the maid, a kleptomania, clean up the rooms.   Some of the customers are on holiday, some are traveling business men but a good number are lovers or men who need a place to bring prostitutes.  Mari has learned a lot about people from observing the guests at the hotel.

We first meet her lover/abuser (maybe in his mid fifties) when they have to throw him out of the hotel because the prostitute he had brought to the hotel runs from the room screaming that he is a filthy pervert.  The mother, after making sure they are paid for the room, tells him to never come back.   Mari is intrigued by his voice.  We think she is a virgin but we cannot be sure.

One day she is on an errand in the town on the island where she encounters the translator (he ekes out a living translating Russian into Japanese-we never learn his name).   The man profusely apologies for the incident at the hotel and Mari assumes she will not see him again. Wanting to learn more about him, she follows him back to his small cottage.    In normal behavior, he is the most courteous kind gentle person.  I do not wish to describe what he does to her other than say it is degrading in the extreme.

We then have at least two opened questions.  Why does Mari crave having this done to her over and over, almost live for it, and why does the translator, who might have killed his wife, act as he does in the face of his seemingly contrary nature.  Mari begins to make up lies to tell her mother to cover her time with the translator.  He begins to send her, care of the hotel, beautifully loving letters.  There is no reason not to see him as loving her.

There are interesting developments involving the hotel maid, Mari and her mother and we learn a lot about how a small hotel is managed on a Japanese resort island.  We also meet the translator's mute nephew in a really bizarre sub-plot with one very shocking and staggering line you will be stunned by, I know I was.

The relationship between 17 year old Mari and the translator is puzzling to say the least.  I have three daughters 14, 16 and 19 and something like this happening seem to me impossible, purely crazy but that is what Mari's mother thought also.

The ending is really well done.  It gives us a feeling of real closure.

As long as you are not offended by near x-rated sex scenes, I recommend this novel for its wonderfully imaginative plot lines, its treatment of the relationship between Mari and her mother as well as Mari and the translator.    It can inspire you to think deeply about the relationships of sadism and passion, love and control.   I think it can also be seen as a story about the consequences of living in a very controlled society which has lost its bearing.

The last two translations of Japanese novels I read were marred by also sorts of typos and misspellings. errors any proofreading at all would have found.   Hotel Iris: A Novel is flawless and the translation is very elegant.

Yoko Ogawa was born in 1962.   She has written over twenties books but only a few have yet been translated.   One of her novels was made into a movie and she has won numerous Japanese literary prizes.  

There is more information on this title on the webpage of the publisher, Picador.   Picador publishes a lot of very interesting cutting edge works and I saw lots of great titles in their very diverse catalog.

"Revenge-Eleven Dark Tales" by Yoko Ogawa

"Revenge-Eleven Dark Tales" by Yoko Ogawa (2013, 174 Pages, translated by Stephen Snyder)

 Yoko Ogawa  (1962) is one of Japan's highest regarded of contemporary writers of fiction.  I have posted on her award winning novel, The Professor and the Housekeeper and three of her longer short stories from  her collection, The Diving Pool.   I was very delighted to be presented the opportunity to read a brand new collection of her short stories, all centering around revenge.  The title is more than honest when it says these are dark tales.  After reading many post WWII literary works I am convinced the defeat of Japan in the war lead to the destruction of much of the Japanese value system and this destruction lead a society with a propensity for order and regulation into a confrontation with its own darker side from which it has never fully recovered and this is what these stories reflect.

My procedure in posting on collections of short stories is to look individually at at least half of the stories and only upon completing this to generalize about the collection as a whole.  I will say I loved this collection but it is very stark and looks some horrible things in the face and they look back.  Sometimes they smile and sometimes they don't.


"Then the strawberries dried out, wrinkling up like the heads of deformed babies"

"Afternoon At the Bakery"

The lead story in the collection, "Afternoon At the Bakery" sets the tone perfectly for the collection.   We enter bakery shop, which for most of us, I know for me, is a fun safe feeling place to spend sometime and money.  I do not expect pain or a glimpse of something very tragic to be found within the confines of such a delightful place.  There is no one in the shop when the narrator enters.  She looks around and the place is so perfectly orderly and everything looks and smells delicious.   At first she thinks it is rude no one is there to wait on her but she shrugs it off and decides to buy two strawberry short cakes.  A another customer enters and says she can go out and find the owner if the woman is in a hurry, but no she can wait.  It turns out the other woman supplies spices to the bakery.   The narrator tells the other woman that she is there to buy short cakes for her son's birthday and says he will always be six because he is dead.  To her surprise the woman does not at all respond to this information.  They begin a conversation about the beauty of mold.  Just as we knew it would, the conversation takes a very strange turn.  We learn about the child and how he died.  We see in this simmering tale how a few bad minutes can change a life for ever and sometimes make it seem better for it to be over.  The ending is very painful and very real.  This story lets us see the terrible power of obsessions.

"Mrs J"

Owaga is very skilled at starting a story in a seemingly very calm safe place, like a bakery shop or a boarding house run by an eighty year old widow, and gradually letting us see the horror below the surface.  Many, very many, lives have a horror behind the smiles and I think this is one of the core themes of Revenge.  The story starts out with some observations on the very dull seeming life of the landlady, Mrs J.  She does not like cats and I admit because of this I do not like her.   The narrator slowly becomes her favorite renter and they become friends of a sort.  We learn the widow has no love for her passed husband.  Of course we know the story will soon meander to the macabre and we are not at all disappointed.  I do not want to spoil the plot of this marvelous work so I will leave the rest of the plot untold.

"Lab Coats"

One of the anomalies you notice, even in the fiction of women seen as strongly into women's issues, is that the interesting women in the stories are normally described as beautiful, the not so intriguing ones do not get this tag.   It is almost as if being a ugly woman was a crime even a devoted feminist could not forgive.  This story is set in a hospital.  There are two onstage female characters, hospital clerical administrative type workers.   Part of their job is to inventory the gowns that come back from surgery, remove anything from the pockets and send them to the cleaning department.  It is very boring work and sometimes nasty as the gowns are often covered in blood.  The women get to talking to pass the time.   At first they just talk about the gowns, the odd things they have found in the pockets, including body parties then they begin to talk about their lives.  The narrator of the story keeps thinking about how beautiful her coworker is, about her white skin.   One does get a feeling her interest is more than purely aesthetic.  The beautiful woman reveals she is having an affair with a married doctor who does not think the time is right to tell his wife about her.  We listen to her story and we think, another woman deluded by a man using her for sex then we learn how dangerous that can be.

"Welcome to the Torture Museum"

"Welcome to the Torture Museum" starts out with a random list of people who died today.    The narrator does not just think about dead humans, she also notices a dead hamster in a garbage can at a fast food place.  (This begs the question of how he got there in the first place!)   The plot action begins when a detective knocks on her door to tell her the man who lives in the apartment directly above her was violently murdered.   He was a doctor at a hospital, in his residency.  The detective shows her a picture of the man's body and asks her if she knows him.   He questions her about what she might know about the man.   It turns out a patient at the hospital where the man worked was also killed and the police are looking for a connection.    We get to know the woman and her boyfriend a bit.  She tells him about the visit from the police detective.   Somehow the boyfriend thinks she is treating this matter as a joke and he storms out.She decides to go for a walk to reflect on what just happens, she is not real upset it seems over the possible loss of a boyfriend.  She stops in front of an old stone house with a sign that says "Museum of Torture" and decides to go in.    Now the story gets really fascinating as she converses with the old man who is the curator of the museum.  He loves his work.   Now the story gets really fascinating and I will leave it unspoiled.

"Poison Plants"

I loved these lines, spoken by a rich older woman living alone in a mansion, "but bored as I have been by the silence in this house for so many years, I find myself absorbed by the stillness, now that he was near me".

There are two main on stage characters in this marvelous story.  One is an older woman, evidently wealthy and the other is her musical school protege who she supports through a private scholarship.  As a condition for her sponsorship he is to come to her house every other Saturday night and have dinner with her and report on his progress.   The conversations between the woman, the story is told in her person, and the boy, maybe mid-teens, are really interesting.  He marvels at the things in her house.   She tells him piano has not been tuned in thirty years.  Her daughter used to play it but she died long ago.  Everyone she really knew is dead now.   She in her mind calls the boy, "The Prince".  The ending of the story is very strange and made me rethink the whole story.

There  are six other stories, all simply a great pleasure to read.   All of the stories have a "low key" tone, none screams out "horror coming" at you but that just makes them all the more powerful.  These stories have the capacity to disturb in that they can bring us to confront our darker side.  The conversations in the stories are wonderfully done.  I have no ability to say if the translation is well done or not but the stories read beautifully.

I am reading this in Participation in the Japanese Literature Challenge 5

There is more information on the title at the publisher webpage

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa (2003, trans. by Stephen Snyder, 2009, 180 pages)

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa (1962-) is one of the most blogged about Japanese novels of the last year.    Everyone loves this book.    I have wanted to read it for a long time but have not been able to find it in any of the book stores I frequent here in Manila.    I did find and post on her collection of three short novels, The Diving Pool about six weeks ago.   I liked that so much I finally decided to order her most famous book  from Amazon.com.    Even with the high shipping charges, I am very glad I did.

There are many very good posts on this book.   (Normally after I read a book I do a book blog search so I can benefit from the insights of others.   If I know I will read a book I often wait until I have read it before I read other posts.)   I will just keep my post here very brief.   

 The professor was once a famous mathematician but 25 years ago he got in a bad accident that damaged his brain.    He now has only 80 minutes of short term memory and can remember nothing that happened earlier than 20 years ago.    His sister in law hires a series of housekeepers to take care of him and everyday he has no memory of who they are.   He has developed coping mechanisms for this problem such as putting notes on his clothes to explain things to himself.    A new housekeeper is hired by sister in law and she and her son develop a special fondness and relationship with the professor.   The professor becomes very attached to her ten year old son.    I will tell no more of the plot but is very well done and I cared about everyone in the book, even the sister-in-law.   

This book tells us a lot about how memory works.   It goes into the beauty of mathematics.    It shows us how relationships can develop even when there seems little hope of real human contact.    The story is told in a very elegant fashion.     I also learned a good bit about baseball in Japan.   I liked this book a really lot and endorse it for all.    

In the interest  of full disclosure, the publisher has sent me a free copy of her latest book, Hotel Iris and I will post on it for the Japanese Literature 4 challenge starting soon.

Mel u

"The Dormitory" by Yoko Ogawa

"The Dormitory" by Yoko Ogawa (in a collection of three novellas, The Diving Pool-1991, translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder, 55 pages-Picador Publishing)

"The Dormitory" is the third novella by Yoko Ogawa I have blogged on.    Prior to this I read the title piece, "The Diving Pool" about a strange obsession of a young woman, then "Pregnancy Diary", a very odd work in a diary format about the pregnancy of the diary keeper's sister.   Both of these stories have a fey, near otherworldly feel to them.    I liked them both a lot.    I think the last story in the collection, "The Dormitory" is the best of the three.    

The narrator of "The Dormitory" is a woman, about age 28, living by herself in Tokyo.   Her engineer husband is working on a big long term project in Sweden and his wife is preparing to join him,  it seems.   We learn a lot about her day to day routine.   To me it seems she enjoys being alone and is in no rush to go to Sweden.   Sweden is to her a very far away very exotic place.    One of the themes of Ogawa's work seems to be about being alone-the sadness and the pleasures of being alone.   One day the soon to  start college male cousin of the narrator comes for a visit.   He will be going to the same college his cousin graduated from.   He asks her if she knows a good place he could live.   She suggests he live in the same private dormitory that she lived in during her college days.    She contacts the owner of the dorm to be sure he is still in business and has room for her cousin.   Yes he does but he advises her that things have some how changed in a \way that feels a bit sinister to the narrator though she cannot articulate it.   She advised her cousin that the two of them will go visit the dorm and tells him do not be shocked when you see the dorm owner has both legs and one arm amputated.   The dorm has for sure gone downhill in its appearance and looks a bit shabby.   It is nearly vacant compared to the old days.   I do not want to give away any more of the story.   It reads like the build up of an old fashioned horror story.   The personality of the narrator is a bit strange and quite interesting.

 The best known work of Yoko Ogawa (1932)    is The Professor and The Housekeeper which I hope to read soon.   

I am in the process of expanding my appreciation for the short story as a literary art form.   If any one has any suggestions as to "the world's best short stories" please leave a comment-

Mel u

"Pregnancy Diary" by Yoko Ogawa

"Pregnancy Diary" by Yoko Ogawa from her collection of three novellas, The Diving Pool (1991, translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder -49 pages)

I have already posted on the title piece from the collection from which this story is taken, "The Diving Pool", a strange and beautiful tale of a young woman and her obsession with watching her step brother dive.   The most famous work of Yoko Ogawa (1962) is The Professor and the Housekeeper which was loved by all who blogged on it.   

The diary in "Pregnancy Diary" refers to a diary kept by the sister of a pregnant woman who lives with her sister and brother in law in Tokyo.    The  diary begins the day before the sister makes her first visit to the maternity clinic she has chosen, The M Clinic.    The details of the visit are set out in the diary.    The clinic offers a full range of services from prenatal care to in house birthing facilities.    The diary keeper has her own unique perceptions and attitudes.    Like the central character in "The Diving Pool" she may never be physically alone but she is lonely and isolated and does not understand human relationships as people commonly do:

In, fact I don't really understand couples at all.   They seem like some sort of inexplicable gaseous body to me, a shapeless, colorless, unintelligible thing, trapped in a laboratory beaker.

Her observations on her sister are very interesting:

She seems to sleep a lot these days;   and she seems quite peaceful, as if she has wandered off into a deep, cold swamp.

Soon the pregnant sister begins to find food smells make her nauseous.    The other sister begins to do her cooking not in the kitchen but out in the yard.   The pregnant sister loves part of the prenatal examination procedures in which a clear gel is spread all over her body from her lower stomach on down.  The purpose of the gel is said to be to improve the quality of the ultrasound scans.    To me the reaction of the pregnant woman to this procedure is more than a little strange:

When they are finished, one of the nurses wipes my stomach with a piece of gauze.   I always want it to go on a little longer, so that makes me sad..When they are done, the first thing I do is go to the restroom and pull up my blouse again to look at my stomach.   I always hope there's some gel left, but there never is.  It is not even smooth when I rub it-I feel so let down.

The pregnant woman goes through different phrases.   For a while she will barely eat and loses weight then she begins to eat all the time.   The doctor tells her she must stop her weight gain.  

Nothing really amazing happens (this is not a remake of Rosemary's Baby! )    Both sisters seem a bit odd and the brother in law seems disconnected somehow.    The pleasure of "Pregnancy Diary" is in the   observations of the diary keeper and in our efforts to figure out what is really going on in the lives of the pregnant  sister and the brother in law.   Ogawa for sure lets us feel as if we are their and we believe in and care about the diary keeper and her sister.   (The sisters almost felt with a bit of a push they could be characters in a work by Emily Bronte if she had lived in post world war II Tokyo).    "Pregnancy Diary" is easy to read.   It may not be a master work of the art of the short story but I am glad I took the time to read it and I think most readers will also.   I enjoyed the diary format a lot.

I am getting more into the short story now and would love to have suggestions as to other works.

Mel U

"The Diving Pool" by Yoko Ogawa

"The Diving Pool" by Yoko Ogawa (50 pages, 1991-translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder) is the lead story in a collection of three short stories by Ogawa under the title The Diving Pool.   The Professor and the Housekeeper also by Ogawa has to be one of the most blogged about Japanese novels of the last year.    Everyone loves it.   (Sadly, I have yet to find it in a  book store here in Manila but I was so happy when I saw The Diving Pool in a local book store.    As soon as I read the quotation from Kenzaburo Oe on the cover ("Yoko Ogawa is able to give expression to the most subtle workings of human psychology in a prose that is gentle yet penetrating")  I knew it was a must read for me.   

The central character and the narrator of  "The Diving Pool" is a teenage girl.   Her father is a Christian minister in a Protestant church in Japan in the early 1990s.   He and his wife, the mother of the narrator, run and live in an orphanage for children in most cases abandoned by their parents.   Most of the children find adopted homes as infants.   A few with special needs stay on in the orphanage.   Our narrator grew up among children who had no real parents.   We see relayed in  very subtle ways how this has shaped her psyche.   The narrator loves to watch a boy, a bit older than herself, who has been in the orphanage about ten years (older orphans are rarely adopted from the home) diving from high dive into the diving pool.    She loves the beauty of his body and of the dives.   She some how has kept a mental collection of all the dives by Jui, who she sees as a step-brother, in her mind.   Clearly she is feeling sexual desire and love mixed together.   There is a mentally disabled girl at the orphanage.   This girl, Rui, is several years younger than our Narrator and seems to very much look up to her.   For reasons that are not on the surface clear, our narrator does something very cruel to this girl.    One would think under these circumstances the narrator would be appreciative of her parents.   Instead, she wishes they were, in her darker moments, dead so she could also be an orphan.   I somehow wondered if the father's love for the church and the doing of good deeds had turned him away from his duties as a father.    The narrator feels no real human connection to any one but the Jui, the diver and she does not understand what those feelings are and they are further confused by the fact that Jui is her step- brother.  Jui is a person of near saintly temperament.   When he is asked if he is upset that his parents abandoned him because of drug addiction he says no they could not help what they were.    We wonder how he found such a kind wisdom so young and we wonder what is behind his obsession with achieving a perfect form in diving.   We see the loneliness of the narrator and we also must wonder how the parents became involved in the Christian ministry in a country in which Christians are a very small minority.   We wonder if this cutting off from traditional religious roots through the adoption of an alien religion is in any way behind the angst of the lead character. Is the seeming emptiness of the life of the narrator a commentary on Christianity as a religion brought into Japan as a result of its defeat in war?    The imagery of the novel is very beautiful.   There is clearly a powerful artistic intelligence at work here.    There are two other stories in this collection and I look forward to reading them.   

Yoko Ogawa was born in 1962.   She has written over twenties books but only a few have yet been translated.   One of her novels was made into a movie and she has won numerous Japanese literary prizes.