Hotel Iris
Yoko Ogawa
Stephen Snyder, translator
Picador
ISBN Number: 9780312425241

Reviewer: Matthew Katz


          Were I hired to market Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa’s latest novel, Hotel Iris, I’d be out of a job. Her publishers wouldn’t need me. This book could publicize itself.

          Over the last twenty-plus years, Ogawa’s star has risen steadily with fiction published in such Western luminaries as The New Yorker and Zoetrope. Her sparse writing style has been conveyed by the nimble Stephen Snyder, a Japanese literary scholar and translator of (among others) Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe.

          More importantly, the book is about sex. More to the point, for Western audiences, the book is about very naughty sex. Underage sex: the narrator/heroine, Mari, is seventeen years old—much younger, maturity-wise, as the shut-in naïf at the novel’s outset. Rough sex: Mari’s lover binds, flogs, torments, and humiliates her, slices at her skin and rips bloody shards from her doll-perfect hairdo (when not writing her secret love letters waxing existentially on literature, life by the sea, and the nature of longing). Taboo sex: this lover/perpetrator lies far beyond Mari’s ken in terms of age and life experience.
 
          However, even books chock-full of naughty sex get publicists. Why not Hotel Iris; why not me? After all, I reviewed Ogawa’s stellar collection of three novellas, The Diving Pool. I’m committed to her quiet tone, her method of linguistic painting using a palette of accumulated details and as sparse a plot as possible for her canvas.  I’ll take a crack at the job:

          Pop quiz, for those readers already titillated by so much book-review foreplay.

          Who do you think turns out to be Mari’s love interest? Will it be: a) Mari’s mother, the ruthless front-desk patrol of the seaside Hotel Iris; b) the hotel’s kleptomaniac maid; c) the ghost of Mari’s father (who died when Mari was eight years old); d) the ghost of Mari’s grandfather (who died when Mari was a teenager); e) an impeccably-dressed, whore-mongering Russian translator (“past middle age, on the verge of being old”) expelled from the Hotel Iris; f) the translator’s tongue-less nephew, an architecture student; and/or g) any of Mari’s friends (genders are of no concern here)?

          First, let’s define our terms here—specifically, “love” and “interest.” Mari, at seventeen years old, knows nothing of life save toiling at the Hotel Iris. This setting (for a girl’s life, as well as a novel) offers all the Gothic charms of Romantic potboilers (or, more recently, the Stanley Kubrick film adaptation of Stephen King’s resort horror story The Shining)—only without the charm (and, compared to The Shining, none of the killing). Such an unformed lump of clay as Mari, in such a setting, unleashes the concept “love” like a feral puppy, roaming free in the realms of abandonment, neglect, abuse, betrayal, blackmail, and, yes, frighteningly ill-advised sex. And, in terms of “interest,” Mari is so starved of meaningful or even healthy human interaction that anyone in her constellation of contact could be argued an “interest.”

          Taking all this into consideration, I would argue that the answer to our pop quiz (who turns out to be Mari’s love interest?) is...choices a-f. Almost all of the above. Except for the trick choice g—because poor Mari has no friends.

          Let me not mispublicize Ogawa’s work here. Literally, Mari’s love interests are only two. There’s the middle-aged Russian translator, whose command over a prostitute (who publicly humiliates him when they’re ejected from the Hotel Iris) is a power so subtle that only Mari could sense it and become enraptured by it. And then there’s the translator’s college-aged nephew. How ironic that this boy, tongue-less while the old man can charm and imprison with his words, should also seduce Mari.

          On another level, however, Hotel Iris reminds me of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. If it’s been too many years and too many Christie novels since you’ve read it, Murder on the Orient Express is the one where Poirot discovers that all the suspects killed the victim. Here, everyone I listed—save, of course, Mari’s nonexistent friends—acts as some sort of accomplice to Mari’s adolescent explorations of love and sex.

          Mari’s mother, for whom “love” tragically falls somewhere between “custodianship” and “enslavement,” nurtures her daughter by starving Mari of any stimulation or interaction and, at punitive times, literally of food. Especially when she is tugging callously at Mari’s hair when dolling up her daughter, the reader recognizes a pattern of love reflected by the translator’s sadism.

          Mari finds it surprisingly easy to keep the affair secret from her mother. However, her mother’s friend (the kleptomaniac maid) steals one of the translator’s love letters and threatens to betray the secret. Mari, who willingly submits to the translator’s pummeling, rebels against the maid and counters with her own threats to preserve the secret. Secrecy is love; threats (here, Mari can expose the maid as a thief and a betrayer of the hotel and her mother) are what lubricate a sexual relationship. Mari needs a secret to hide and a threat to wield, even as she exposes all to her sadistic lover. In this sense, the maid becomes intimately involved.

          And then there are the ghosts of Mari’s father and grandfather, who haunt the sexual landscape that this story occupies. There are no ghosts literally; Ogawa does not write for eternally adolescent readers who today crave angels, demons, ghosts, and vampires. But the father and grandfather, while never alive during Ogawa’s story, nonetheless make their psycho-sexual presence clearly felt through the translator’s grand/fatherly presence in Mari’s life. What do we know about Mari’s father? That he died young. He withstood Mari’s mother's lovelessness through hard drinking and a secret life. His death was a drunken, dark secret too. Most tellingly, he was the only person in Mari’s early childhood who ever indulged her. While the translator lives longer, his secret rage and his ironic indulgence of Mari’s masochistic urges fulfill Mari’s sexual longing for her father. Mari’s grandfather strikes a clearer memory but as an image of sickness, suffering, and death. Mari remembers caring for her dying grandfather at the Hotel Iris, his moans of agony as well as his yellowing, disease-addled body. When the translator succeeds in seducing Mari, he succeeds in part by simply being more than three times Mari’s age and many calendar page-turns closer to demise and death. The translator sports natty clothes, tidy hygiene, and a rage that Mari idealizes as a youthful impetuousness. Mari loves him for his youthfulness but clings to his decrepitude.

          From the minds of lesser writers, such a psycho-sexual drama featuring this precocious heroine would be the most interesting story they could muster. Ogawa, with all her talents, need not stoop to rendering Hollywood-ready genre fiction merely better than others could. To end Hotel Iris, Ogawa concocts an evocative brew of death and survival that melodramatically resolves the storylines of Mari, her middle-aged lover, and her mother. Ogawa conceives a climax that is thrilling and reads elegantly, but its readerly effect feels more Hollywood cinematic than literary.

          Hollywood is where we turn for new versions of the same-old same-old. Good literature is where we discover innovators of new stories. With Hotel Iris, Ogawa is seduced by Hollywood ghosts—and ultimately betrays her gifts of superior storytelling.