The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka

One of my earliest childhood memories is the time I nearly drowned in a community swimming pool. I can’t remember my exact age at the time, but I remember being brave and venturing further towards the middle when, all of a sudden, my feet were no longer touching the bottom and my mom screaming for help. Then, I felt a man’s arms grab me and pull me out of the deep end. Although I don’t remember anything about this stranger, what he looked like or what he said, I’m grateful for his presence that day. Memory can be like that. Certain details stand out, while others blur and fade away. Fortunately, I recovered from that traumatic event and still enjoy going to the pool. Unlike the privacy of other activities, such as writing, swimming is a very public activity. You are witness to others’ actions just as they are witness to yours. For her third novel, The Swimmers, Julie Otsuka uses this setting of the community swimming pool in order to tell a very public story that soon becomes much more intimate in the handling of sensitive subjects of dementia and dying. It’s a powerful book that not only touched upon a memory from my childhood but would later be a poignant look at an event I experienced as an adult.

The Swimmers (2022) by Julie Otsuka, Photo Credit: Natalie Getter

As she does with her first two novels, When the Emperor was Divine and The Buddha in the Attic, Otsuka utilizes first-person plural perspective to tremendous effect. Narrating from the collective view of the avid swimmers at the local community pool, she allows the reader to become a part of this eclectic group united in their religious devotion to swimming. “There are those who would call our devotion to the pool excessive, if not pathological,” our narrators tell us. Most swimmers are identified from the polite distance of another pool mate: “Lane 3 breaststroker Mark,” “sidestroker Sydney.” When, on occasion, the narration slips into second person, the book’s protagonist sharpens into focus: “You wake up one day and you can’t even remember your own name (It’s Alice). But until that day comes you keep your eyes focused on that painted black line on the bottom of your lane and you do what you must: You swim on.”

“Bad moods lift, tics disappear, memories reawaken, migraines dissolve, and slowly, slowly, the chatter in our minds begins to subside as stroke after stroke, length after length, we swim. And when we are finished with our laps we hoist ourselves up out of the pool, dripping and refreshed, our equilibrium restored, ready to face another day on land.”

However, their routines become disrupted by the sudden arrival of a crack at the bottom of the pool. It was interesting to note the tonal shift, as the crack is treated with such fervor as though it becomes the end of the world. Scientists study it. News reports are generated, reflecting just how something as simple as a crack can be detrimental in the lives of this community. The swimmers become anxious, as the initial crack spreads, ultimately resulting in the pool being closed down for an indefinite amount of time.

With the closing down of the pool, Otsuka pulls us into a much deeper and personal story regarding a specific member of that community. Alice was diagnosed with dementia, and through her rigid routine of going swimming, was able to have improved clarity. Once the swimming pool closes, Alice’s illness becomes progressively worse, resulting in being placed in a nursing home. Much like the cracks in the swimming pool, Alice’s past memories begin to emerge: heartbreak, miscarriage, and her Japanese ancestors’ internment. Otsuka’s prose is powerfully subdued, and you find yourself stunned by what she has managed, your throat tight with the beautiful detail that Alice, among all the things she forgets, still “remembers to turn her wedding ring around whenever she pulls on her silk stockings.”

“She remembers that she is forgetting. She remembers less and less every day.”

We also experience some sections from the point-of-view of Alice’s adult daughter, a writer who rarely has time for her mother. Told in the second-person, this section really channeled my inner emotions surrounding the difficult final year of my own’s mother’s battle with dementia and subsequent death. This is a novel of not just accumulation, but repetition, scenes looping in the way that the mind does, or the way swimmers swim laps. As this novel is incredibly short with such powerful and simple prose, the emotions come rising to the surface, only when you’ve read the final sentence of a chapter.

Julie Otsuka, Photo Credit: Jean-Luc Bertini

The pool that so dominated the novel’s first half has practically been erased by the book’s second half. However, it does recur once again, much like a buried memory. Alice recalls the place but struggles at remembering any of the pool’s many rules. Her experiences rise up above water, only to return back below the surface as her time in this world begins to expire.

In a time for me where death is both concrete but also unimaginable, and when cracks in life appear for no discernible reason, The Swimmers was a truly exquisite read. I remember someone once telling me how when we lose a loved one, the small and mundane details are forgotten. We grieve. We grow. Then, those inconsequential details once again become part of our lives. I highly recommend this novel, as well as Julie Otsuka’s previous two books, as worthwhile companions.

“And for a brief interlude we are at home in the world.”

Have you read this book? I’d love to know your thoughts! Let me know with a comment below.