It's no secret that I like weird. I like confronting. And I like erotic. Hotel Iris is darkly erotic - and if you haven't read anything erotic before, don't confuse "erotic" with "sexy" or "sensuous". They don't necessarily go hand-in-hand, especially when you get a book like Hotel Iris. Erotica is more about the psychology behind our desires and motivations, and understanding our psyche and how we tick - our inherited sense of guilt and shame, especially.But I don't want to give you the wrong impression. Hotel Iris isn't erotica, it's fiction that deals with sexual awakening in a form that most of us would consider repugnant and beyond our ken, or at the very least makes us uncomfortable. It doesn't make me uncomfortable in the slightest, but this isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea. The story is narrated by seventeen year old Mari, who works in her mother's hotel on the coast of Japan. It is just her and her mother, who doesn't seem to like Mari much and sees her only as a doll she can dress up, lacquer her hair, and parade to impress people. Mari secretly yearns for her mother's forgiveness, though for what she can barely articulate. One night, while Mari is on the front desk, there is a ruckus between two guests, the guests in room 202: a man and a prostitute. When they're kicked out of the hotel, Mari hears his deep, commanding voice and it thrums deep inside her. She wants nothing more than to be commanded by that voice. The man himself is old and unassuming, timid even in person - or so he seems when Mari begins to get to know him. He is an impoverished translator of Russian into Japanese, living by himself in a small cottage on an island off the coast. When Mari goes to his home, they both become different people: he becomes someone full of confidence and demands, and she will do anything to please him.I got copies of Hotel Iris and The Housekeeper and the Professor at the same time, but I decided to read this one first because its dark subject matter instantly appealed to me. I am drawn to these books that let me in to people's most secret desires, to feel alongside them and understand them, in the privacy of a book's pages. I love the intensity that comes with darker subject matter. That said, I didn't find this as dark or as confronting as I expected (when you have Story of O as your benchmark, everything seems tame by comparison). The prose is clean, clear, confident, economical and perfectly balanced, a style that appeals to me. There's no waffling, no heavy-handed adjectives, no flowery descriptions or obscure reflections. There's a lot that isn't said, not in a way that leaves you confused about what's going on, but in the way like you're blind, or hearing muffled voices through a door - you're allowed to see what Mari wants you to see, but not to get too close. It's hard to describe, but I was never fully satisfied, like I got to lick the icing but not eat the cake. And yet, I'm not unhappy, and the story is one that transports you.My senses seem sharpest when the guests are all checked in, settled in their rooms getting ready for bed. From my stool behind the desk, I can hear and smell and feel everything happening in the hotel. I can't say I have much experience or even any real desires of my own, but just by shutting myself up behind the desk, I can imagine every scene being played out by the people spending the night at the Iris. Then I erase them one by one and find a quiet place to lie down and sleep. (p.18)He had undressed me with great skill, his movements no less elegant for all their violence. Indeed, the more he shamed me, the more refined he became - like a perfumer plucking the petals from a rose, a jeweler prying open an oyster for its pearl. (p.93)It's really quite beautiful, but it left me under-nourished, wanting more. It's such a short book, a brief story, with the hint of Mari ripening and breaking free of her oppressive mother at the end, but it's a sad story too, a story of a sad man who lost his wife to a tragic scenario, whose psyche I am fascinated by in the glimpses we get of his dual nature. There's so much going on here, and yet hardly anything - I will want to re-read this: knowing where the narrative is going, I will be able to stop and soak in the nuances, the connotations and "pry open the oyster for its pearl." Okay so I can't really use that language myself without smirking, but Ogawa can write like that and it's perfect.The underlying point of the novel isn't highly original, but that doesn't make it any less valid. Mari sees herself through her mother's eyes, who contradictorily praises her beauty to everyone but makes Mari herself feel ugly and unwanted. When the translator (who remains nameless throughout the novel) abuses her in his cottage, both verbally and physically, she takes it on as a just punishment, a way to revel in what she thinks is her true nature. There's never any clear evidence that the two actually have sex - she says at one point towards the end that she has never seen him naked (his sockless feet is the closest she comes) - though he does perform oral sex on her. It's rather like, sex isn't what Ogawa wants us to see, but the deep scars we inflict on ourselves - Mari's self-hatred or lack of confidence in herself; the translator's sense of loss, guilt and loneliness. They aren't games being played out between these two. The translator becomes the more complicated, interesting character - Mari I feel I understood, but he is more tricky. Our perception of him is limited to what Mari notices and thinks and relays on to us. I really wanted to understand him, but in the end he remained enigmatic.One of the disappointments, for me, was that even though this is set in Japan with Japanese characters, it had no real Japanese flavour. Having lived there for three years, I know they don't eat ham and eggs for breakfast! How much of it is the way Ogawa wrote it - which reminded me of how many Australians write, untied to any particular place so it could be almost anywhere - or the way the translator translated it? I admire translators, but I worry about translator interference. Now, it could be simply because it's a hotel, one that caters to a lot of foreign tourists - though that is my assumption; it's never actually stated that they're foreign, just that they're tourists. And the Japanse are all tourists in their own country, because they love to explore it and they rarely get any decent time off to travel overseas. Anyway, while there were certain cultural aspects coming through, it was easy to forget that this was a Japanese story, set in Japan, with Japanese characters, which, to me, was a loss.
Fucking is fucking weird. Fact.Hrm. This one's tough. Just as with Ogawa's novellas, I found myself marveling at her ability to summon gorgeously terrifying, ornate mind-pictures with stark, crisp minimalism. She just chooses all the right words to put next to other words when she makes sentences. Out of words. But not very many words. Gimme that A, professor!(Here comes the inevitable 3-star) but...in this case, she is using those words and words to make sentences to make paragraphs to make chapters to make a book about, well, BDSM. Not a subject I find myself studying much in my reading life, or a romantic situation I can relate to at all. A little bit of tuff tumble time is okay so long as it goes both ways, but if you're planning on choking me with a scarf, you'd better kill my ass or prepare for some cheap shots to the nuts followed by a television set for a hat. Anyway, it's all the rage, E.L. James, because apparently I am all alone in thinking being tortured and degraded is not a sexy prospect. So why doesn't Ogawa have millions of dollars and a Big Shit movie deal? Lady can write, son! Well, because this chaotic world's only semblance of order is its indisputable tendency to embrace unfairness, and the people who reap the rewards are too often those who write smut about tampons being yanked out of ladyparts, or shitty AB poetry about your annoying, pretentious boyfriend and what he means to your dental hygiene. That made sense to me, I promise.So the torture scenes are tough to read because torture, but made easier to stomach by the fact that our 17-year-old narrator is just loving it. Hey, man, it's your bedroom, and if you're having a nice time with rope cutting into your wrists and nipples, groveling on the dirty floor so you can put a 60-something old man's socks on with your mouth, don't let me be the one to tell you how revolting everything I just typed is to me.A BDSM tale with hints of murder mystery, contrasted with scenes of total sweetness. Our Christian Grey is an unattractive, aging translator, clumsy and unassuming out in the wider world, but pretty much psychotic when you dim the lights. He treats her like a precious jewel. He kicks her in the stomach. He writes love letters. He has a penchant for awkward segues.She resists, but he seizes her by the hair and throws her into the lake...She does not know how to swim, so her arms and legs thrash uselessly and her mouth opens and closes in wild convulsions...I can picture every detail of Marie's suffering, from the way the seaweed wraps about her ankles to the echoes of her cries among the birches. And then, in my mind, you, Mari, have taken her place.Would you like to have lunch at my home next Tuesday? I will cook for you.AndHow lovely your pale face looks when you are on the verge of suffocating and want to ask for my help...How long will this weather continue? It's the worst hot spell I have seen since moving to the island.Wow. Seriously, the weather? Niiiiiice touch. Oh, and this book has yet another absolutely horrifying subway death scene. Between this novel and The Pale King, I feel compelled to BEG you, my big city dweller friends, to make absolutely certain that every piece of your person and the clothing on your person has cleared the doors before they shut. The doors hate you. The doors want to eat you. Fear the doors. This book is beautifully written, but totally fucked. You can see all the little wormies wriggling around inside teency-cutesy Ogawa's creeptastic, hall-of-mirrors nightmare skull, and you rightly squirm. Not my kinda subject in this instance, but definitely my kinda gal in general. More, please.
Do You like book Hotel Iris (2010)?
I had to change the rating of this book. Three stars really weren't enough for this compelling, powerful, sensual and at times very macabre little story.God, where have I been while all these incredibly talented new Japanese authors were publishing their books?! I was stuck with writers of the past (they're amazing) and didn't think I could've found such a beauty in an author so young! Ogawa Yoko's writing left me simply mesmerized: simple, yet polished, almost completely free of figures of speech and so, so far for resembling purple prose, but yet unmerciful, unrelenting, captivating, so dark, so disturbing but impossible to ignore and not to feel drawn to. Such a talent deserves to be praised over and over again.Mari is the protagonist of the story. She's a seventeen-year-old girl who works at her family's Hotel, the Iris of the title.She's the teenager with the most defined and determined nature I've ever found in a book. She lost her father when she was still a child, witnessed the gradual decline of her grandfather's sick body; she's obsessed with violent death, with its most gruesome aspects, often finding herself imagining how fascinating the decay of the human body is.Her only close relative still alive, her mother, is a strict, cold woman who exploits her daughter at the work place, denying her the fun and the normal, healthy life a girl so young should have.So maybe this is a study in human psychology. Mari has no men in her life, all her male relatives are dead. As a reaction against death, against its mysterious power to suddenly manifest itself and steal people from her life, a mechanism that's hard to understand and accept, she turns into this pain-seeking, violence-addicted young woman, whose most exciting thoughts revolve around provoking and defying death, breath control and hardcore bondage, all sorts of humiliation and degrading acts, like she doesn't deserve to be alive. Her "submissive" nature makes her notice a man who is thrown out of the hotel, one night. Referred only as the "translator", because he translates works from Russian into Japanese, she feels attracted to him, his authoritative and aggressive tone, sensing his "dominant" disposition.It doesn't matter that he's old enough to be her grandfather. They start a disturbing relationship, where she lusts after every single brutal act he inflicts on her.However, Mari is far from being a victim, here. She craves it, she can only orgasms in those moments, she's simply made that way. It might be because of her past, or the lack of love from her mother, we don't know for sure. She's just incapable of feeling anything, besides dark and fucked up desires. She also has this irresistible dark humor. It might sound as an oxymoron, but I laughed a lot while reading this book, even at times when I should've probably cried or felt shocked. It made the book even more charming to me.The whole story carries an oppressive atmosphere of approaching tragedy. You can't help but knowing it since the first pages of the book. That's why the absolutely chilling, non-romantic, anti-climatic ending leaves you rather full of questions about Mari's future, more than heartbroken over the turn of the events. Hotel Iris is not for the faint of heart, nor for too sensitive people.There's heavy BDSM here, graphic descriptions of corpses, death and sex. But if you have a strong stomach and are looking for beautiful prose, original plot and an interesting, contemporary author, this is the right book for you.
—CamAlive
I'm going to go ahead and give this one a big ol' NOPE. I was on board, if bored, until the point when the 67 year old male love (?) interest starts sensually oiling up his mute & no-tongued nephew's body on the beach in front of his 17 year old female lover Mari, making her jealous -- like, really: we're approaching the level of demented for demented's sake by this point. The old man lover is kind of a terrible person in many ways. Mari is turned on by him because she wants to be submissive and to her it seems there are no limits to the ways in which he can abuse her. When he watches a trapped mouse with its tail stuck in the door of a cage suffer trying to pull free and then drowns it, I was done with him and with this book.I am no stranger to the concept of loving one's dysfunction. I understand how the pieces of the characters fit together and also, Metaphors!, and how traumatized or beaten down people transfer their feelings into sexual behavior. Hotel Iris was still the reading equivalent, to me, of watching an awful piece of performance art. There is the sense of not being able to roll my eyes back far enough.
—rachel
Wow. Ogawa has written another haunting novel. I'm not sure what to write about this book, because truthfully there were times that I was rather shocked at the deplorable and violent manner in which Mari was treated by her companion, the translator. Her first foray into an intimate relationship consisted of being tied up, hung by the ceiling, photographed, physically and verbally abused - all of which Mari craved and enjoyed. So, why did I cringe whilst reading about this S&M relationship? Because Mari is seventeen and has never experienced unconditional love from anyone (except her father, who was an alcoholic that died rather suddenly in Mari's young life). She believes she is ugly and undeserving of happiness and views her relationship with the translator as a means of escape from her stagnant life at the hotel; where her mother roughly brushes her hair every morning and constantly berates her for merely existing. With no friends to talk with or hang out, Mari relishes the freedom she feels when she is with the translator. And this translator takes advantage of Mari's naivete. He engages this young lady by playing on her loneliness and desperation. At first, he seems rather odd, but quiet and soft spoken. There is a walk around town and a wave goodbye, which leads to a letter that implores Mari to please meet him again. Once they are on his island and in his house, the atmosphere shifts and the translator is no longer kind - instead he becomes forceful and authoritative with regards to what he expects from Mari. Its interesting to watch this relationship progress throughout the book and the ways in which Mari's demeanor changes, along with her feelings about her body and self. I think that the introduction of the translator's nephew was an easy way to begin the ending of Mari's relationship with the translator. Of course, the ending is not what I expected. I won't spoil the ending for you, but suffice it to say that the translator turns out to be just as ugly a person as I had figured out earlier. As for Mari, I'm not sure what I feel towards her, except disappointment and pity. In the end, these characters definitely captured my attention as did their story. Ogawa is able to describe a scene so vividly that you can clearly picture Mari's thrill at deceiving her mother or the excitement she felt while reading the translator's letters tucked away behind the front desk when no one was looking. The writing is solid and the tone is perfect at capturing the unpredictable shift of events throughout the novel. I would definitely recommend this book to Ogawa fans.
—Nadia
