Hotel Iris A Novel [Paperback]

A tale of twisted love from Yoko Ogawaauthor ofThe Diving PoolandThe Housekeeper and 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 Irisis a stirring novel about the sometimes violent ways in which we express intimacy and about the untranslatable essence of love.

Yoko Ogawa's fiction has appeared inThe New Yorker,A Public Space,andZoetrope.Since 1988 she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, and has won every major Japanese literary award.

1. Mari first encounters the translator when he is expelled from the hotel. What exactly fires her attraction, why do you think she is initially drawn to him, even before seeing what he looks like?

2. Why does Mari's mother so carefully groom her? Is she like a fixture in the hotel that must be polished? Or is the hotel is her domain, and Mari her subject? Why does she assert such strict control over her daughter?

3. Discuss the tlS"