Stories: Pregnancy Diary by Yoko Ogawa

A brilliant and disturbing short story on pregnancy from Tokyo-based author Yoko Ogawa, "Pregnancy Diary," appeared in the Dec. 26, 2005 edition of The New Yorker.

Excerpt...
The room was always empty at midday, before the afternoon appointments began, and we could study it to our hearts’ content. A collection of bottles arranged on an oval tray seemed particularly mysterious. They had no caps or seals, just glass stoppers, which I felt an irresistible urge to pull out. The bottles had been stained brown or purple or deep red by the fluids they held, and when the sunlight shone through them the liquid seemed to glisten.

A stethoscope and some tongs and a blood-pressure cuff lay on the doctor’s desk. The thin, twisting tube, the dull silver fittings, and the pear-shaped rubber bulb of the cuff made it look like a strange insect nestled among the other instruments. There was an odd beauty in the unintelligible letters printed on the medical charts. A poster on the wall read, “Position for use in treating breech presentation.” In the picture, a woman was on her knees with her chest pressed against the floor. She was wearing a leotard that was so tight she looked naked. She lay there in the yellowed poster, staring vacantly into the distance. Then the chimes from a school somewhere in the neighborhood would start ringing, telling us that it was time for the afternoon examinations. We knew that we had to leave when we heard the nurses coming back from lunch.

Sometimes women would be looking out of the windows on the third floor. They had likely just given birth. They had on thick bathrobes and their hair was tied back in ponytails. None of them wore makeup. Wisps of hair floated around their temples, and their faces were expressionless. I wondered why they didn’t seem happier at the prospect of sleeping above an examination room full of such fascinating objects.

Original story in The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005