Note: This review contains spoilers. Please turn away now. We have a phone for complaints regarding spoilers, but we deliberately do not man it. Nor give out the number.
As a male from a famously male-dominated society, where many women are sold into slavery in the name of marriage, it’s easy for me to look at a dynamic where the male seems ostensibly in power and immediately proclaim, “Oh, that’s abuse. Plain and simple.” Such was my initial reaction with Yoko Ogawa’s Hotel Iris, where a 17 year old girl gets into a consensual relationship with 67 year old man, where the man and the girl both derive pleasure from (only) the girl being abused, degraded and made to do things that only a sexual slave would be fit for.
As someone who has read Ogawa’s both The Housekeeper and the Professor and The Memory Police, I was expecting something similar. A quaint, but affecting tale that’ll stay with you long after you have finished reading the book. But I wasn’t ready for what I now know has been described as “Japan’s Fifty Shades of Grey”. I deliberately went in blind as I try to do with most books, and the book completely blindsided me. The book starts with Mari, the 17 year old girl witnessing a deluge of insults from a prostitute who’s being thrown out of a hotel room, and the occupant of the room saying, “Shut up, whore.” in a commanding voice. Mari gets immediately attracted to the quality of the voice, and later yearns to hear things being said in that tone by that voice. I have noticed this in Japanese literature – where people are attracted and/or they remember particular features of a person. I remember, in Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance, the protagonist remembered the ears of this woman he was trying to find, and I vaguely remember people remembering and being attracted to certain parts, things or quality of a person. Personally, this feels completely alien to me – not only do I not remember certain features of a person in isolation, but I’d be hard pressed to describe the nose of a person I know, or their ears, or feet, or whatever; you get the idea. I realise I’d be completely useless giving the description of the perpetrator of a crime I have witnessed to the police, but that’s besides the point.
Coming back to the story, Mari serendipitously meets the translator on one of her shopping trips, and follows him to the ferry, buoyed by the fascination and attraction to his enigmatic voice, and eventually is confronted by him, with him being surprisingly polite and he subsequently apologises for his transgressions at the hotel. Mari is quite overwhelmed and doesn’t know how to react, her inexperience and the age-gap showing starkly. The translator tells her that he is working on translating a Russian tale into Japanese, where one of the protagonists of the story is a young woman like her, also coincidentally named Mari, and that she’s quite beautiful, just as the fictional character. This brief encounter ends with Mari waving her hand at the translator as he and the ferry are slowly receding away from Mari and the coast.
He, later, writes a letter to her, expressing his pleasure at their chance encounter, and how it has been a while since anyone had waved at him, and that gesture from Mari, which she had done quite thoughtlessly and out of instinct, had ended up being precious for him. He invites her out again, and thus begins a series of secret rendezvous where Mari would lie through her teeth to her mom, inventing excuses ranging from taking a rich old lady to the clinic to getting a toothache checked out by the dentist to sneak away and meet him. And not only did they meet, the translator would whisk her away to his home in and island nearby, and (debatably) abuse and humiliate her and bring her back to the mainland in various states of mental disarray. All of this finally culminates on the fateful day, where in a particular fit of rage, he cuts her hair to punish her, and due to a storm, the ferry had to stop and she had to stay overnight at his place. The townsfolk were out with their pitchforks to crucify him, and instead of facing their possibly misguided judgement, he decides to jump into the ocean and end his life.
This book brings up an important idea, about the nature of consent. If an older person with a lot of experience and influence over you, makes you do things you do not want to do, but end up liking anyway afterwards – is that consensual? A case could be made that consent is consent and, adults and almost adults should take responsibility for their choices, but I tend to fall on the side that maybe it is not, always. Especially when there’s such a huge age gap, and the younger one is at an age where they are impressionable, even if they are at the precipice of legal adulthood.
There’s also the matter of agency. I had this discussion with a friend back in 2016 – I was quite adamant that I wouldn’t ever marry someone who lived in India and whisk them away to a western country where I live. It would almost be akin to taking a hostage, and bringing someone here, away from their parents and their friends, where they would have to be dependent on me for almost everything. Not to even mention that anyone who first lands here ends up not understanding the local accent, no matter how good they are at English. It would be even more alienating where they aren’t able to talk to the locals. But my friend pointed out that, what if they wanted to do it, despite knowing the challenges. Who am I to choose it for them, they should have free will and agency. I was young and naive back then, but the point still stands – if someone wants to be degraded and get kicks from being treated like what is generally accepted as deplorable, do we take away that agency from them and tell them it is not allowed?
I also put a bit of thought into why the translator had a proclivity towards abuse and why Mari herself had a tendency to like being degraded. The translator did say in one of his conversations with Mari, that, at the end of a translation job, after he has dropped off his work, he feels this deep sense of unease, and the fear of being forgotten and roaming a metaphorical void for eternity. Satisfying the desires of his flesh and doling out abuse confirm his existence for him. I do not have anything in my life, feelings or tangible, that is even vaguely familiar to this, so I have to chalk this up to a kind of feeling or experience I have never had. As for Mari, it’s not entirely fleshed out, but she doesn’t seem to have gotten unselfish love for an extended period of time. Her dad used to care for her, but after he died, all her mom seems to care about was making money, and only seemed to love her from the lens of someone who doted on her specifically because she was pretty, and was her progeny; and this sense of pride towards her was only based on her physical appearance or features like the length and lustre of her hair. This doesn’t feel like a healthy kind of motherly love, but a love that is selfish and twisted. I have this feeling that if Mari had the healthy kind of love at home, she wouldn’t have gotten a lot of pleasure from the kind of treatment the translator was giving her, nor would she have craved the twisted validation that came with it.
Ultimately, I feel like my judgement of this book could be wrong. I do not want to inherently feel that getting pleasure out of being degraded or abused is bad. By my personal standards, it seems to be, but I do not feel it’s wrong for other people to do so with consent. I wonder if I’d have been kinder to the book if it didn’t deal with something that I didn’t personally dislike. This reminds me of my friend Abinash, who I had given Murakami’s Norwegian Wood to read. “It’s all good and all,” he had said, “but did they need to cram so much sex in there?” I had laughed, but had also understood that his personal taste in books, or maybe even in general, didn’t tolerate sex and sexual things much. Maybe that’s what happened to me here.
I wonder what he’ll think of this book.