Hotel Iris
  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407087481
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 176

Hotel Iris

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Jul 2010
Paperback
1 Jun 2011
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A dark and beautifully written story of a young girl's tragic love triangle with an older man and his young nephew

In a crumbling, seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet, seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother fusses over the off-season customers. When, one night, they are forced to eject a prostitute and a middle-aged man from his room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's voice, in what will become the first gesture of a long seduction.

Mari begins to visit the mysterious man at his island home, and he initiates her into a dark realm of both pain and pleasure. As Mari's mother and the police begin to close in on the illicit affair, events move to a dramatic climax.

By the author of The Housekeeper and the Professor

  • Published: 1 July 2010
  • ISBN: 9781407087481
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 176
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About the author

Yoko Ogawa

Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space and Zoetrope. Her works include The Diving Pool, a collection of three novellas, The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris and Revenge.

portrait photo of Yoko Ogawa

Also by Yoko Ogawa

The Memory Police
Revenge
The Housekeeper and the Professor (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)
The Diving Pool
See all

Praise for Hotel Iris

Both very weird and very good... Image by perfect image, we are led down into a mysterious and gripping universe, simultaneously beautiful and terrifying... From the opening sentences of Hotel Iris you know that every word will count and that every scene will be the occasion for strong and strange feeling

Times Literary Supplement

Exploring dark desires is something at which Ogawa has become disconcertingly adept

New York Times

It's brave territory for Ogawa, and she manages in with sharp focus; she creates moments of breathtaking ugliness, often when least expected...but also sometimes a longing that is touching and tender

Independent

Ogawa explores the power of words to allure and destroy in this haiku-like fable of love contorted into obsession... A savage novel

Publishers Weekly

Precisely written, this dreamlike narrative expands into an ambiguous story of sexual dependency and damage. Ogawa's exact prose glitters as menacingly as the surrounding sea

Emma Hagestadt, Independent

To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state tinged with a nightmare... She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance

Guardian