A collection of stories The first major English translation of one of contemporary Japan's bestselling and most celebrated authors From Akutagawa Prize – winning author Yoko Ogawa comes a trio of novellas about love, motherhood, fertility, obsession, and how even the most innocent gestures contain a hairline crack of cruel intent. A lonely teenaged girl falls in love with her foster brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool-a peculiar infatuation that sends unexpected ripples through her life. A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, taking meticulous note of a pregnancy which may or may not be a hallucination-but whose hallucination is it, hers or her sister's? A woman nostalgically visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo, a boarding house run by a mysterious triple amputee with one leg. Hauntingly spare, beautiful, and twisted, The Diving Pool is a disquieting and at times darkly humorous collection of novellas about normal people who suddenly discover their own dark possibilities

"Highly original. Infinitely charming. And ever so touching." – Paul Auster A publishing phenomenon in Japan and a heartwarming story that will change the way we all see math, baseball, memory, and each other She is a housekeeper by trade, a single mom by choice, shy, brilliant, and starting a new tour of duty in the home of an aging professor. He is the professor, a mathematical genius, capable of limitless kindness and intuitive affection, but the victim of a mysterious accident that has rendered him unable to remember anything for longer than eighty minutes. Root, the housekeepers ten-year-old son, combines his mothers sympathy with a sensitive curiosity all his own. Over the course of a few months in 1992, these three develop a profoundly affecting friendship, based on a shared love of mathematics and baseball, that will change each of their lives permanently. Chosen as the most popular book in Japan by readers and booksellers alike, The Gift of Numbers is Yoko Ogawas first novel to be published in English, and in the U.S