BookDragon Blog

If you’re looking for the quirky, original Yoko Ogawa, her latest, Hotel Iris, is probably not for you.

Go back to your bookstore or library and check out the delightfully inimitable The Housekeeper and the Professor (2009), about a genius math professor with only an 80-minute memory, his patient housekeeper, and her young son. Or, if you want edgy and surprising, you’ll find a satisfying gasp or two with the three novellas in Ogawa’s English-translation-debut, The Diving Pool (2008).

What is most shocking about Hotel Iris is not the subject matter – which proves prurient – but that so much of Ogawa’s quiet freshness seems to be missing. No one would argue that Ogawa crafts gorgeous, spare prose, but, oh this story …

Working in her family’s seaside Hotel Iris, 17-year-old Mari hears the nameless Translator before she sees him. “Shut up, whore,” his voice resonates at a fleeing prostitute who pauses only to hurl explicit epithets at the “filthy pervert.” Mari is inexplicably fascinated with the mysterious old man: “I had never heard such a beautiful voice giving an order. It was calm and imposing, with no hint of indecision.”

Even while Mari lives under her scheming mother’s control, the hotel provides a keen vantage point from which to observe humanity’s seedier habits. Her mother extols Mari’s beauty, and yet allows a pedophile sculptor to nearly rape Mari as a child, and thinks nothing of trying to “get a little something” from an indecent drunken guest who gropes Mari. That her father has been dead – his battered body resurfaced after a drunken brawl – since Mari was 8 proves yet another reason she becomes an easy target for the right predator.

Two weeks later, when Mari happens to see the man out on errands, she follows him, hoping to hear that voice once more. When he confronts her, she’s surprised that he “seemed more frightened than I was,” that he “seemed smaller than I had imagined.”

He is instantly despicable, licking his lips, “savoring each syllable” when he finds out Mari’s young age. He begins to seduce her with the story of the Russian novel he is translating, about a young woman – who happens to be named Marie – and Marie’s explicit affair. He admits he is translating the novel on his own, that his real work is far less lofty, involving “guidebooks and commercial pamphlets and a column for a magazine.” He also reveals he’s lost his wife (murdered, the villagers insist).

Fifty years Mari’s senior, he easily initiates their inevitable affair. In spite of a final warning from the same prostitute, who confronts the Translator with Mari outside a restaurant, Mari’s naive reaction is to further protect the old man.

Their affair is viciously abusive. Diminished outside, the Translator turns into a sadistic monster once in his secluded island cottage where he has full control of Mari’s body. Only then does she hear that powerful voice that first lured her and now keeps her utterly trapped. In spite of horrific near-death experiences of bondage and strangulation, Mari cannot stay away: “Only when I was brutalized, reduced to a sack of flesh, could I know pure pleasure.”

Such unmitigated violence cannot continue without an eventual victim, although how that resolves by book’s end hardly raises an eyebrow.

Review: San Francisco Chronicle, May 13, 2010

Readers: Adult

Published: 2010