Ogawa (The Housekeeper and the Professor) explores the power of words to allure and destroy in this haiku-like fable of love contorted into obsession. One rainy evening, Mari, a downtrodden 17-year-old who helps her demanding mother run a seedy seaside hotel, overhears a middle-aged male guest ordering an offended prostitute to be silent. In the days that follow, every word—both spoken and conveyed in surreptitious letters—from this man, a hack translator who may have killed his wife, gradually and inexorably leads Mari to submit to his every sadistic desire. Ogawa’s relentlessly spare prose captures both Mari’s yearning for her lost father and the translator’s bipolar oscillation between insecure tenderness and meticulously modulated rage. As this savage novel drives to its inevitable conclusion, Mari’s world collapses around her in both a terrifying bang and a pitiful whimper. (Cover photograph and summary from Barnes & Noble.com.)
Hotel Iris, to me, is a novel of contrasts. There is the contrast of the named versus the unnamed characters, the spoken word versus the written word, and who can share more freely, those who can speak verbally or those who are mute. In this novel, Ogawa illustrates that the reader can come to know the characters referred to only by their titles better than the characters whose actual names are known and that the written word can be more honest and freely given than the spoken word. I felt that the amount of described bondage scenes overshadowed the rest of the novel. It's not that these scenes were incredibly descriptive, it's just that the reader knew this was happening and didn't need as much as detail as was given each time. But the beauty of the writing made this book well worth reading; I found myself anxious to read more as I was soaking up the gorgeous descriptions.
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