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Hotel Iris
Ogawa’s previous novel to be translated into English, The Housekeeper and the Professor, found an audience on these shores immediately when it was released last year. The quiet story of a mathematics professor whose short-term memory resets every 80 minutes, it was a quirky, zeitgeisty love story, which doesn’t surprise, given that it was published just five years earlier in Japan.
Fans of Ogawa, looking for the same sort of well-worn warmth, should not heed the call of that daydream-provoking window on the cover of Hotel Iris. Written in 1996, Hotel Iris is a much darker, colder novel, with relationships built to destroy rather than heal. Seventeen-year-old Mari narrates, largely from the front desk of the hotel her mother runs, following the death of Mari’s father and grandfather. At the outset, a passive-aggressive peace is established between Mari and her mother, and then disturbed when a prostitute storms out of a guest’s hotel room, appalled. When she discovers him in town a few days later, Mari follows him and makes his acquaintance. We can’t really say “befriends,” though the two strike up an intense relationship. But it’s one based almost entirely on sexual humiliation, as Mari finds out when she visits the man at his home, and he rips off her clothes and ties her up on the floor.
Ogawa treads perfectly during the sex scenes, describing only enough to freight them with Mari’s emotions and neatly dodging exploitation. Still, we see Mari’s damaged sense of self from the beginning. And in the same way math provides easeful shorthand for The Housekeeper’s love story, the BDSM of Hotel Iris reads like the vernacular of power dynamics.
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