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In her native Japan, there are few major literary awards Yoko Ogawa has not already been decorated with. To the rest of the world, however, she remains surprisingly little-known, with only a handful of her 20-plus works currently available in English. This state of affairs is surely destined to be temporary if this tome – written in 1990, but only just released in an English-language translation – is anything to go by.

Told in sparse yet evocative and sensuous language, The Diving Pool is a trio of novellas very loosely bound together by the theme of obsession. The title story tells the tale of a lonely teenage girl who falls in love with her foster brother, and is compelled to watch him as he practices on the high-dive board; Pregnancy Diary sees a young woman become fixated on the day-to-day happenings of her sister’s expectancy; and Dormitory follows its adult protagonist as she is drawn back towards the odd, dilapidated lodgings she occupied as a student.

The most striking thing about the stories is Ogawa’s elegant, concise style, with every word put to gently purposeful use (credit must also go to the deft translation skills of Stephen Snyder). Although little actually happens, she imbues each work with a sense of foreboding, but foreboding of the most delicate and intangible kind. The worlds her characters inhabit are dreamlike and insular, and there is a sense throughout of a secret pleasure gained from being vaguely off-limits – of being the only one awake in a house full of sleeping souls.

Her style finds a particularly worthy personification in Dormitory: the fragile manager who runs the building has no arms and only one leg, yet still manages to perform complicated actions remarkably skillfully with his remaining “beautiful...precise” foot. Mildly unsettling yet relentlessly graceful, this collection is unlikely to be the last Ogawa book you will seek out.

Paul Kay