Hotel Iris: A Novel

“[Ogawa] creates moments of breathtaking ugliness, often when least expected . . . but also sometimes a longing that is touching and tender.” —Daniel Hahn, The Independent

From the award-winning author of Mina’s Matchbox and The Memory Police, a dark and twisted psychosexual fever dream about the relationship between an innkeeper’s daughter and their guest.

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 sex worker 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, he is the subject of eerie rumors around town—some say 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.

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