Hotel Iris -- Yoko Ogawa, Paperback

A tale of twisted love from Yoko Ogawa--author of The Diving Pool and The Housekeeper and the Professor.

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, and her cool but controlling mother, Mari is a sophisticated observer of human desire, and 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, and he soon initiates her into a dark realm of both pain and 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 and what is desirable are recklessly engaged.

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

Author: Yoko Ogawa
Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
Published: 03/30/2010
Pages: 176
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.40w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9780312425241

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 02/08/2010 pg. 28
Kirkus Reviews 03/15/2010
New York Times Book Review 05/16/2010 pg. 28

About the Author

Yoko Ogawa's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope. Since 1988 she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, and has won every major Japanese literary award.