In the Pool reviewed at hackwriters.com and in Metropolis

Recently, Hideo Okuda's In the Pool received rave, educated reviews at both hackwriters.com and Metropolis!



An excerpt from Hillel Wright's review in Metropolis, issue 164:

"My favorite was “Cell,” a story in which high school student Yuta Tsuda becomes addicted to his cell phone and develops an uncontrollable nervous twitch when he’s unable to use it. The story offers great insight for every one of us, from Luddite to geek, regarding this pervasive contemporary phenomenon."

And from Charlie Dickinson's engaging review at hackwriters.com:

So while In the Pool has many laugh-aloud moments, at a deeper level, this comedic collection has some intellectual backbone. These are stories about characters tamping down their neuroses and getting on about life.

In that regard, a note about Japanese psychotherapy with which Japanese might be more familiar than English readers: Okuda has Dr. Irabu refer to the great pioneer in Japanese psychotherapy, Morita. A contemporary of Freud, Dr. Masatake Morita (1874-1938) cared little about the roots of neurosis, preferring to educate patients to accept neurosis and go on with action-oriented steps to improve their lives. "Just do it!" might have been his slogan. As one student of Morita, Takehisa Kora, has written, accepting reality as it is or "arugamama means to jump in anyway, fear and all."

[quatation from Kora, Takehisa, How to Live Well: Secrets of Using Neurosis, State University of New York Press, 1995, p. 13]