Hotel Iris

' Ogawa] creates moments of breathtaking ugliness, often when least expected . . . but also sometimes a longing that is touching and tender.' --Daniel Hahn, The Independent From the award-winning author of Mina's Matchbox and The Memory Police, a dark and twisted psychosexual fever dream about the relationship between an innkeeper's daughter and their guest. 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 sex worker 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,