Book: Hotel Iris

[elusivek]

Hotel Iris
Yoko Ogawa
Amazon.com Link

A tale of twisted love, from the author of The Diving Pool and The Housekeeper + 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.

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Right... what did I read again? Yes, I was feeling like reading some Japanese authors as they have a knack of writing open-ended or vague endings... I was feeling contemplative and wanted to read something like that.

Well, I did get something like that but I'm feeling a bit bereft. I read this in one sitting and I'm all "what did I just read?"

I did guess that this would be some sort of BDSM kind of thing, but there seems to be no plot, no actual substance to it.

Mari meets old guy, relationship progresses, weird nephew visits, weird nephew leaves, then it all culminates to spending the night with the old man, then, nothing, zip, nada. Old man dies. Loose ends.

Unless, (I have an idea now) the whole thing is just Mari's imagination... from their lunch onwards till the overnight stay. The truth is Mari did spend a night with the old man, but everything that happened in between - the circus/fair visit, the nephew, the swimming, all that was just Mari's imagination to escape the true horrors of the old guy?

I thought it weird that it was the waiter that said she was kidnapped. Perhaps that IS the case.

Aside from that, nothing else made much sense. Mother still doing a 17-year-old's hair? Maid stealing bandages? The sit in story of the blind foreigner guest?

This was entirely a strange read. And now I'm second guessing myself and coming up with other plausible scenarios of how things fit in.

I guess in the end I did get to read what I had wanted to read in the first place.