Those Who Live With Loss Must Cope

LET'S SAY YOU are a third of the way through Julie Otsuka’s latest book, The Swimmers, and someone asks you to describe the story. If you have encountered her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, you might comment on the familiar reliability of the collective “We,” the prevalence of lists, the cataloguing of characters’ habits and choices.

But if you prefer to be concise (so you can return to your reading), you would say the novel is about a group of swimmers who belong to an underground pool in their town. Above ground, they struggle with “bad backs, fallen arches, shattered dreams, broken hearts, anxiety, melancholia, anhedonia,” among other afflictions. But down below, in the pool, they can rely on the consistency of lanes, their lap counts, and their rules. They can even tolerate occasional rule breakers and bad management. Everything makes sense until a mysterious crack appears at the bottom of the pool.

Soon, one crack develops into many. When experts cannot find the origin of the anomaly, it leads to one conclusion: The pool must close. Ultimately, the swimmers lose their refuge. The pool was in no way a cure for their afflictions, but it offered a rare sense of identity that helped the swimmers cope. Without it, some eventually adjust and learn to live like their “above-ground” counterparts. But Alice, diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, has no choice but to accept her fate.

Throughout this five-part novel, Otsuka’s formal choices allow us to move seamlessly between collective (and sometimes, institutional) memory and the intimate experiences of a daughter grieving her mother. As a writer, I often look for parallels across seemingly disparate storylines. In this case, I wanted to find a specific link between the crack in the pool and Alice’s diagnosis. But as I became immersed in Otsuka’s prose, I realized that would betray the complexity of the experiences she renders: Alice is a mother, a wife, and a daughter. Alice spent her childhood in a Japanese American incarceration camp. Alice is a swimmer with a rare dementia. And her daughter, witnessing her decline, catalogues everything Alice has left behind. Seemingly random personal items—including but not limited to family mementos, magazine subscriptions, purses, Post-it notes—become vehicles to memory, proof of the life Alice lived after all that was lost and “destroyed in the first frenzy of forgetting, right after the start of the war.” Everything Alice leaves behind carries weight. Nothing is insignificant.

To cope with the stress of the ongoing pandemic, I have been gravitating toward stories about hauntings. While I would not call The Swimmers a ghost story, the characters are certainly haunted. A woman keeps calling for her husband in the halls of an assisted living facility while her husband struggles with sleep and keeps seeing his wife in the kitchen. At one point, the swimmers even consider the possibility that the mysterious crack is a portal to another world, and this theory, like many others, does not bring them comfort. For both the crack and Alice’s diagnosis, scientists and experts attempt and fail to find solutions. Stretched thin, they may resign or abandon the problem. But those who live with loss must cope. Grief cannot be abandoned.

Sojourners has partnered with Bookshop.org; when you order books through the links on sojo.net, Sojourners earns a small commission and Bookshop.org sends a matching commission to independent bookstores.