Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space and Zoetrope. Her works include The Diving Pool, a collection of three novellas, The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris and Revenge.
The Life of Yoko Ogawa
Yoko Ogawa was born Yoko Hongo, March 30, 1962 in Okayama, Japan.
When Yoko Ogawa discovered “The Diary of Anne Frank” as a lonely teenager in Japan, she was so taken by it that she began to keep a diary of her own, writing to Anne as if she were a cherished friend.
To conjure the kind of physical captivity that Anne experienced, Ogawa would crawl, notebook in hand, into a drawer or under a table draped with a quilt.
She studied creative writing at the prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo.
She resigned her job as a secretary after marrying her husband and began writing while her spouse was at work. She began writing as a hobby, and her spouse had no idea she was a writer until her debut novel, The Breaking of the Butterfly, won a literary award. Her novella Pregnancy Diary, which she wrote while her son was a toddler, received the famous Akutagawa Prize for Literature, solidifying her name in Japan as one of the most important writers in modern Japanese literature.
The Writing of Yoko Ogawa
In Japan she has published more than 50 books, however unfortunately to date only a small number of these have been translated into English, mostly her early work.
Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award, including the Yomiuri Prize for The Housekeeper and the Professor and the Akutagawa Prize in 1990.
Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space and Zoetrope. Her works translated into English include The Diving Pool, a collection of three novellas, The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris and Revenge.
She writes in haunting, spare, shimmering prose punctuated by acts of casual violence and vindictive spite. Profoundly unsettling, magnificently written and instantly memorable, her stories vindicate status as one of Japan’s greatest living authors. Ogawa is such a gifted writer, not a word is wasted, yet each resonates with a blend of poetry and tension.
Kenzaburō Ōe has said, ‘Yōko Ogawa is able to give expression to the most subtle workings of human psychology in prose that is gentle yet penetrating.’
Ogawa is unusual in the fact that she has also published award-winning works of non-fiction. In 2006, she teamed up with mathematician Masahiko Fujiwara to write An Introduction to the World’s Most Elegant Mathematics, a book dedicated to the beauty and fascination of numbers.
Best Yoko Ogawa Books in English
The Housekeeper and the Professor
Each morning, the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to one another. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant mathematical equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles – based on her shoe size or her birthday – and the numbers reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her ten-year-old son. With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory.
Revenge
Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders – locked in the embrace of an ominous and darkly beautiful web, their fates all converge through the eleven stories here in Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge. As tales of the macabre pass from character to character – an aspiring writer, a successful surgeon, a cabaret singer, a lonely craftsman – Ogawa provides us with a slice of life that is resplendent in its chaos, enthralling in its passion and chilling in its cruelty.
The Diving Pool
A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster-brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool – sparking an unspoken infatuation that draws out darker possibilities.
A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, but rather than a story of growth the diary reveals a more sinister tale of greed and repulsion.
Driven by nostalgia, a woman visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo. There she finds an isolated world shadowed by decay, haunted by absent students and the disturbing figure of the crippled caretaker.
The Memory Police
To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed.
When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn’t forget, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?
And there is one more translated novel Mina’s Matchbox scheduled to be released in Aug 2024, which we are greatly looking forward to.
If you enjoyed our profile of the wonderful Yoko Ogawa, check out Natsume Soseki and Modern Japanese Literature
