Customer Reviews

Hotel Iris: A Novel

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The beautiful cover of this slim novel, an hotel bedroom window looking over a wide sea, suggests a gentle romance -- something fleeting, a little sad perhaps, but tender. Ogawa's previous novel, THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR, about the affection between an old man, a young woman, and a child, leads one to expect a similar beauty here. And when this novel begins to sketch a tentative, courteous friendship between a lonely girl of seventeen working in her mother's seaside hotel and a much older man, one settles in for a bittersweet novella of romantic initiation such as might have been written by Elizabeth Bowen or Anita Brookner.

Wrong! But also right. For no matter where the story goes (and it takes us into some strange territory indeed) it retains some of those qualities of eager innocence, a bud that opens in the span of a single summer. But nothing about the book prepares the reader for the R-rated content. The girl, Mari, first encounters the older man (simply referred to as "the translator" since he ekes out a living translating from Russian) when her mother throws him out of the hotel after a noisy row with a prostitute. Bumping into Mari some days later, he is apologetic and almost old-fashioned in his meticulous courtesy; we assume that this was a one-time occasion that will not be repeated. But Mari, it seems, was equally attracted by the man's power and sense of danger. More than once, she lets him take her to his home on an island a short ferry-ride from the town, and all that happens there is embraced by her as much as by him.

Some readers may be disturbed by the explicit action. But the truly disturbing aspect is the clarity of the author's insight into Mari's mind. Ogawa refuses the easy categories of predator and victim. Short though the book is, she achieves an exquisite balance between innocence and experience that turns a four-star subject into a five-star achievement. I cannot help thinking that she must have taken Thomas Mann's DEATH IN VENICE as her model, inverting its viewpoint and moving it to Japan. She has written a worthy homage, if so.

Seventeen year old Mari is narrator of the Hotel Iris. Her life is not the kind of life any girl her age, or anyone for that matter, would envy. A high school dropout, she lost her father to a violent death at the age of eight, and now she spends her days and nights working the front desk, among other duties, at the Hotel Iris which is owned by her mother. Mari is clearly not only a lonely girl, but an emotionally damaged one as well. Her father's death and the treatment she receives from her mother, who is who is constantly barking orders and criticizing her, have not helped her self esteem.

The hotel is a shabby seaside hotel, presumably in Japan. The only other hotel employee besides Mari and her mother is a kleptomaniac for a maid. The hotel is rarely busy off season, in fact oftentimes its only customers are prostitutes and their clients. One day while Mari is working the front desk a loud commotion and fight ensues in Room 202. A man in his 50's chases a woman, obviously a prostitute, out of the room. He yells, "Shut up whore" at the woman. When Mari hears his voice yelling at the woman, her reaction is, "when giving orders......his voice is beautiful". This, of course, is in contrast to the way her mother orders her around all the time.

When Mari later sees the mysterious man in town she decides to follow him, wanting to find out more about him. Once she meets him, she follows him to an isolated island cottage, there she finds out he is a Russian translator, and what follows is a sick sadomasochistic relationship.

The writing is gorgeous and it is easy to feel a sense of place.......

"The storm had broken over the island by the time we emerged from the pantry. Rain beat against the windows, the wind swirled and the surf washed deep into the cove. Waves crashed on the rocks below shooting deep white spray in the dark. The roar of the sea and the howling of the wind shook the whole island. The translator turned on the light in the room".

You can feel the some of the sick, painful moments as well.....

"He undressed me with great skill, movements no less elegant for all the 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".

OR....

"For me, a superb penalty that would have never occurred to anyone else. He dragged me into the bathroom and cut off my hair".

MY THOUGHTS -- In some ways this book was like a horrible car crash you pass on the highway--you don't want to look, but you can't help yourself. I felt the same way about the book, I wanted to turn my head, but the beautiful writing just would not let me quit. The writing hooked me from the first page of the short (164 page) novel. Because the story is so short, I never felt I totally understood what was going on inside of Mari's head, and why she was so obsessed about continuing to see the unnamed translator; her obsession with him was unshakable. It is tough to read in parts, but in the end, I am very glad I read this novel. RECOMMENDED - 4.5/5 Stars

Mari is 17. She works in her mother's hotel, which is not, contrary to the book cover's suggestion, a beach front place. Mari is lonely. Her mother is bossing her around. She misses her father, who died a while ago during a drinking spree. She is the narrator.
She meets a much older man, who at first attracts attention by his magnificent voice. Mari discovers surprising longings in herself. A relationship grows up on the sly. Mari starts telling lies to her mother to cover her meetings with the `translator'. (He says he is translating a Russian novel about a Marie who has a romance with a riding teacher. I am not sure at all that this is not a red herring.)
From a slow and `harmless' start we develop head on into a surprisingly graphic form of sexual relationship. The girl nose- dives into a masochistic dependency.

I like the format, the short novel/long story, novella type. Much good fiction has been written in this length (160 pages). My doubts about the book are not focused on the tale itself, nor on its execution, nor on the language (assuming that the English version is somewhat comparable to the original.) What does give me a wrong feeling here is the fact that the girl is the narrator. I don't find her plausible as a narrator. She is not the precocious type who would stun the adult world with her x-ray eyes. She has far too much power of self- observation for any 17 y old. This reads more like a superior adult planting her ideas into an alleged teenager. She is not a reader, nor normally given to speculative thinking, and yet she tells us her own story like a master writer. It would be more plausible in the time honored all-knowing third party narrator mode.
I did not `enjoy' this book as an entertainment. A 30 y old woman, the author, impersonates a 17 y old girl to live out her masochism. That is what it boils down to.

Japan is a most self-centered country. Traveling there on one's own and without language know how can be a real challenge for a foreign visitor. The book has some glimpses of foreign longings: the hotel's name Iris seems not to be a translation. The hotel has neon signs with that name. The Japanese ladies choir stays there and sings Lorelei and Edelweiss. An implausible foreign tourist named Iris turns up and is blind. She explores the eponymous hotel like no other guest.
The hotel is in a sea side town, but not on the waterfront. Mari spends much time near the water and describes the view of the water. She mentions the seawall a lot, which I would hardly have noticed until March 11. Seawalls look like a great idea until they are beaten by something larger and stronger.

In conclusion: I don't think I like this book at all, despite acknowledgment of some strengths. How does one rate something like that? I'll go for the middlish compromise.

This book was certainly not what what i was expecting. The teenage girl, Mari, grows up in a seedy surrounding. The life she endures while living with a mother who isn't really a part of her life, with no love or understanding, is sad. The love she yearns for in this older man is very confusing. But whilst i walk in other shoes, i shant not judge. i just feel a hopelessness for teenagers out there with the same predicaments. Maybe what happened to her was a learning experience, but i think not. Was the translator helping her in some odd way?

"Hotel Iris" is an enjoyable novella, up to a point. I was OK with the first sado-masochistic scene, but the subsequent ones were too much for me, and I wonder if they were really necessary. The events were necessary, but was the detailed description?

The protagonist has been scarred by her upbringing to the point that she has this masochistic tolerance, but she is not passive, despite the picture she presents to the world; e.g. she is willing to confront the maid and get the upper hand. There is much about this work that reminds me of a Chekov story, with characters like the mother and the maid, the life story of the translator, perversion aside, and the quaintness of the setting.

The prose and story telling style of Hotel Iris is the just as elegant and compelling as The Housekeeper and the Professor but the story is much, much weaker. You want to keep reading, the author has that way about her, but this story amounts to nothing. It starts in a seaside hotel, that a young girl and her mother own and run when a prostitute creates a commotion and she and her customer are thrown out. The girl is fascinated and attracted to the voice, the commanding voice, of the customer. She is attracted before she even sees him. From there they start a relationship that is anything but common, and while this had me quite intrigued for 90% of the book, it just ends abruptly and in my view goes nowhere. The Housekeeper and the Professor had a bit of an abrupt ending, but that story and those relationships were developed much more before the ending of the book. Needless to say there is no one in this story you will like, or really be all that interested in. I think things really go downhill when the girl has a tryst with the man's nephew..where did that come from? And more importantly where the heck was the author trying to go with it?
Very disappointing, lets hope the next book returns to form.

This is an odd book in many ways. This is my first venture into Japanese fiction, so the disconnect may well be with me and not the author. A young girl becomes fascinated by an older man. They have an affair that lasts one summer. She is subjected to extremely degrading treatment. End of story.
There are flashes of beautiful writing. The prose is taught and sparse, but in the end the novel fails to deliver. The older man, simply known as "The Translator" appears completely inauthentic and his schizophrenia is not convincingly developed. Odd characters like a nephew with no tongue and a blind woman called Iris who comes to stay at the hotel from which the novel takes its name simply never come to life.
Worst of all, the young girl who narrates the story, Mari, fails to crystallise in the reader's mind at all. The thrall under which she falls to the older man is never fully explored. What drives it? An inherent masochistic tendency? Merely feeing from an over-bearing Mother and the spectre of a prematurely deceased Father? The detachment with which she describes her complete sexual humiliation at the hands of the older man somehow fails to be as horrifying as it should. Equally, the attraction she professes to feel for the man who, is his public guise, appears to be shy, diffident, charming and well-mannered, also rings hollow.
I can't help feeling that the author has been too sparse in their treatment of the subject. The important themes examined here should have been more fully fleshed-out. In the end, the strange detachment of all of the principal characters backfires and affects the reader.

I really enjoyed the uncomplicated writing in this book. It's a book to get lost in and let the story unfold as you bask in the many descriptions of place, people and tense moments. The author puts you inside a 17-year old girl's head just as her inner curiosities begin seeking answers outside her fantasies. Ready to rebel against the boring, monotonous life of home and work inside the Hotel Iris, a place her mother owns and controls like a jailhouse matron, young Mari seeks the company of a distinguished older gentleman.

In this graceful gentleman, a translator of Russian books and documents by trade, Mari discovers the happiness and satisfaction that life has failed to grant her thus far. As for us traveling with Mari on her path of self-discovery, we see her newfound friend as something more sinister and tarnished. Though we can later speculate as to why this man is what he is, we're never truly told what made him that way.

It's a story that ventures into the taboos of sadomasochism and yet retains its innocence and affection. It is possible that the male translator of this short Japanese novel written by a woman didn't grasp all that the writer wanted to convey about her young Mari, he does give the bones of the story enough marrow to stand. Ultimately what Hotel Iris demonstrates is what we seek in others is usually what we're trying to locate in ourselves; love and acceptance.

3.5 Stars

I enjoyed Ogawa's "Housekeeper and the Professor" very much, but found this book much too explicit for my taste, so you should be warned there are some pretty graphic pages here.

The theme of this book could have been written as a police report, as an article in a psychology journal or as a novel. Yoko Ogawa has written it as a novel. There are three main characters in the story. The relationship between two of them belong on another planet than that of most readers, although not so far away as to be uninteresting. The relationship between two others belongs significantly on our planet. What the author does is to explore, and probably try to explain, how the relationship on planet one came to exist with what happens on planet two (ours, the readers).

The first relationship is between a man "on the verge of being old" (p.4; the translator) and a fairly young girl, Maria. I have learned that a man's voice is more important than any other single attribute a man might have - and this seems to be the case here: "It (the voice) was calm and imposing" (p. 4). Secondly, the almost old man has to be imposing - so in five words the attraction is explained "(..I was praying that voice would someday give me an order, too." (p. 42). The next topic the author addresses is how Maria came to be attracted by these attributes. Too me it seems that the author put forward a pretty normal, although not very ideal, relationship to the mother as an explanation: "Four clothes on the top pole, three at the bottom, perfectly aligned, with the edges folded back exactly seven inches and secured with two clothespins. It had to be exactly seven inches...Those were Mother's orders." (p. 77-78). However, there are two idiosyncrasies in the personalities of both the almost old man and in Maria: The almost old man can be" timid" (p. 37), but also imposing; Maria is told by Mother that she is beautiful, but she do not believe it: ("Mother had thousand ways to brag about my looks, but half of them are lies." (p. 16).

So, the characters in the novel have some idiosyncrasies that might get the reader to stop and think, as well as swings in the story that has to be digested before they get believable. There are occasionally sentences that deserves to be remembered, but most sentences are floating free of friction, contrasting with the story. ("A car passed from time to time, its headlights shining through the raindrops." P. 1). The end of the story is not what I had anticipated, but more logical than my anticipation - which is good. The story is not easily forgettable, and the novel is very readable.