Hotel Iris Book

The Hotel Iris, a shabby seaside accommodation run by a cruel widow and her seventeen year old daughter, isn't much of a getaway. For Mari, the teenage girl practically chained behind the front desk, it's more like a prison. Remember those famous lyrics of that song, "Hotel California"? You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave....

So I suppose it's not all that surprising that Mari, who has lived a life of restraint, would gravitate to the familiar, with "the translator", a much older man who she heard screaming at a prostitute fleeing his room at the hotel one night.

In ruthless, minimalist style, Ogawa holds the reader helplessly engaged in this disturbing seduction, this grotesque, sadomasochistic adventure that most of us want to turn our heads from, but... we don't. Ogawa makes sure we don't. We are mesmerized, disgusted, intrigued. We would be outraged on behalf of the young lady, but the truth is, Mari is very much along for the ride, so we just ride along with her as she is humiliated and bound and finds secret, painful pleasures that seem almost beyond comprehension.

A Japanese gothic tale, there's a kleptomaniac, a tongueless mute, and the spectre of a strangled woman who walk the streets of this seaside town. Both ugliness and love are found in these pages, and all of it savage. Mercifully, this is a short novel, in knife-point focus. You won't miss a thing, that knife point pressed threateningly into your throat. And you'll like it too, damn it.