There is no singular voice, because it is the collective ‘we’ that begins to tell this story—just like The Buddha in the Attic. And we’re in this pool somewhere with these people, forgetting our daily trials and frantically flailing in the waters that calm the circling minds of the swimmers. The pool covers our blemishes and enhances our unique beauties…

The extremely loose connection between the first part of the book and the last half doesn’t seem to make sense to the story—indeed, they are two apparently separate stories, but the analogies threaded through the disconnected lives of the swimmers, brought together only by the pool, the state of the pool, the availability of the pool in their lives—is escape, health, haven, sanity, excuse and pleasure. And when it’s cracked, they either drown in unbearable lives or find freedom from the ball and chain of a safe habit that keeps them tethered to a suffocating comfort, and they go off and grow wings and find self.

The messages within the analogy are so multifarious almost everyone can relate…

And the many ways that inexplicable crack in the foundation can be interpreted…the mystery, the multiplication of cracks…

It’s kind of like dementia.

So then, the book takes a sharp turn and becomes a guilt-loaded memoir, a guilt-laden picture of a woman who cares for herself first and misses the most precious last years of life with a mother (one of our swimmers, though swimming is almost all but sidelined now) who suffered and sacrificed, bent and conformed to give the daughter everything for a better life, a different life.

There is no warning that this is going to be such a sad memoir. In fact, nothing in the synopsis indicates that this will be more than 50% memoir. It just takes a turn, and then that’s what it is, with barely any context.

Which I suppose is intentional. Takes the reader, who up till now is enjoying a strangely disjointed story about a pool full of isolated, but oddly connected swimmers, completely off guard. You know, like dementia.

The writing style…well, I can certainly understand that not everyone is going to appreciate this style. The whole middle section is so repetitive—and not quite poetically—that it becomes grating. Though it’s not without purpose.

I don’t mind Otsuka’s style. It’s unique. It’s almost as if you’re looking in on the lives of these characters from a very far distance, the writing seems afraid to engage with the emotion the story contains, though many phrases are filled with shame, guilt, pain, fear, and have potential to evoke great feeling. If you’ve read The Buddha in the Attic then you know what I’m talking about. 

It was okay. I didn’t mind it. It wasn’t what I was looking to read, but it was short, so not too tedious.