Yoko Ogawa

Author profile

born

March 30, 1962 in Okayama, Japan

gender

female

About this author

Yoko Ogawa (alternate spelling Yôko Ogawa; Japanese: 小川洋子) was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, and lives in Ashiya with her husband and son. Since 1988, she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Professor and his Beloved Equation has been made into a movie. In 2006 she co-authored "An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics" with Masahiko Fujiwara, a mathematician, as a dialogue on the extraordinary beauty of numbers.

A film in French, "L'Annulaire" (The Ringfinger), directed by Diane Bertrand, starring Olga Kurylenko and Marc Barbé, was released in France in June 2005 and subsequently made the rounds of the international film festivals; the film, so...more Yoko Ogawa (alternate spelling Yôko Ogawa; Japanese: 小川洋子) was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, and lives in Ashiya with her husband and son. Since 1988, she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Professor and his Beloved Equation has been made into a movie. In 2006 she co-authored "An Introduction to the World's Most Elegant Mathematics" with Masahiko Fujiwara, a mathematician, as a dialogue on the extraordinary beauty of numbers.

A film in French, "L'Annulaire" (The Ringfinger), directed by Diane Bertrand, starring Olga Kurylenko and Marc Barbé, was released in France in June 2005 and subsequently made the rounds of the international film festivals; the film, some of which is filmed in the Hamburg docks, is based in part on Ogawa's Kusuriyubi no hyōhon (薬指の標本), translated into French as L'Annulaire (by Rose-Marie Makino-Fayolle who has translated numerous works by Ogawa, as well as works by Akira Yoshimura and by Ranpo Edogawa, into French). (The dockland setting and a significant subplot owe nothing to Ogawa's novella. Interestingly, in conversation with the audience after a showing of the film at the Edinburgh Film Festival, 2006, Diane Bertrand said that she was not sure that she understood the book.)

Kenzaburō Ōe has said, 'Yoko Ogawa is able to give expression to the most subtle workings of human psychology in prose that is gentle yet penetrating.' The subtlety in part lies in the fact that Ogawa's characters often seem not to know why they are doing what they are doing. She works by accumulation of detail, a technique that is perhaps more successful in her shorter works; the slow pace of development in the longer works requires something of a deus ex machina to end them. The reader is presented with an acute description of what the protagonists, mostly but not always female, observe and feel and their somewhat alienated self-observations, some of which is a reflection of Japanese society and especially women's roles within in it. The tone of her works varies, across the works and sometimes within the longer works, from the surreal, through the grotesque and the--sometimes grotesquely--humorous, to the psychologically ambiguous and even disturbing. (Hotel Iris, one of her longer works, is more explicit sexually than her other works and is also her most widely translated.)

http://us.macmillan.com/author/yokoogawa (less)

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Books by Yoko Ogawa

Average rating: 3.82 · 6469 ratings · 1588 reviews · 29 distinct works

	The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder (Translator) 392 avg rating — 4959 ratings — published 2003 — 22 editions	My rating:
	The Diving Pool: Three Novellas by Yoko Ogawa, Stephen Snyder (Translation) 365 avg rating — 569 ratings — 11 editions	My rating:
	Hotel Iris: A Novel 329 avg rating — 561 ratings — published 1996 — 14 editions	My rating:
	L'annulaire 400 avg rating — 63 ratings — published 1994 — 4 editions	My rating:
	غرفة مثالية لرجل مريض by Yoko Ogawa, بسام حجار (Translator) 344 avg rating — 41 ratings — published 2005	My rating:
	Parfum de glace 343 avg rating — 47 ratings — published 1998 — 4 editions	My rating:
	Le Musée Du Silence 380 avg rating — 41 ratings — published 2000 — 3 editions	My rating:
	La Petite pièce hexagonale 384 avg rating — 31 ratings — published 2004 — 2 editions	My rating:
	La marche de Mina 357 avg rating — 30 ratings — published 2006 — 2 editions	My rating:
	Les Paupières 332 avg rating — 19 ratings — published 2001 — 2 editions	My rating:

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Quotes by Yoko Ogawa

“Still, being alone doesn't mean you have to be miserable. In that sense it's different from losing something. You've still got yourself, even if you lose everything else. You've got to have faith in yourself and not get down just because you're on your own.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Diving Pool: Three Novellas

14 people liked it

“Soon after I began working for the Professor, I realized that he talked about numbers whenever he was unsure of what to say or do. Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world. They were safe, a source of comfort.”
― Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

tags: mathematics , numbers , society

7 people liked it

“Eternal truths are ultimately invisible, and you won't find them in material things or natural phenomena, or even in human emotions.”
― Yoko Ogawa

5 people liked it

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Polls

What should we read for June 2011?

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

3 votes, 429%

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

2 votes, 286%

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin

1 vote, 143%

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua

1 vote, 143%

7 total votes

7 comments

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