Yoko Ogawa is no stranger to Western readers. Her 1990 novella collection "The Diving Pool" was published in English in 2008 to strong reviews. Her charming 2003 novel "The Professor and the Housekeeper" – an unusual love story involving a brilliant former professor of mathematics, his housekeeper, and her 10-year-old son – also received much acclaim when released in the US in 2009. Ogawa's fiction has been published in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope.
A highly prolific writer, Ogawa has published more than 20 works of fiction and nonfiction since 1988 and has won every major Japanese literary award. She is known for her precise, economical language and her fascination with mathematics. Her fiction is sometimes described as "eerie" or mysterious.
"Hotel Iris" – in which Ogawa explores questions of obsession and insecurity – is a darker, more sexually explicit book than some of her earlier work. It tells the story of 17-year-old Mari, a 17-year-old who works in a rundown seaside hotel, and who is drawn into a frightening affair with a middle-aged male guest.
