Hotel Iris: A Novel

In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's voice, in what will become the first gesture of a single long seduction. In spite of her provincial surroundings, & her cool but controlling mother, Mari is a sophisticated observer of human desire, & she sees in this man something she has long been looking for.

The man is a proud if threadbare translator living on an island off the coast. A widower, there are whispers around town that he may have murdered his wife. Mari begins to visit him on his island, & he soon initiates her into a dark realm of both pain & pleasure, a place in which she finds herself more at ease even than the translator. As Mari's mother begins to close in on the affair, Mari's sense of what is suitable & what is desirable are recklessly engaged.

Hotel Iris is a stirring novel about the sometimes violent ways in which we express intimacy & about the untranslatable essence of love.

°°° 

Yōko Ogawa (小川 洋子), writer & novelist, was born in Okayama, Okayama Prefecture, graduated from Waseda University, & lives in Ashiya. Since 1988, she has published more than twenty works of fiction & nonfiction & has won every major Japanese literary award available.