Innocent teenager Mari unwillingly helps her strict mother out at the desk of the family’s Hotel Iris, rundown and unloved on the coast of Japan. When an older man and the prostitute he has taken there get into a fight and are kicked out of their room, Mari is immediately entranced by the force of the man’s voice. He is a translator, living on an island off the mainland where Mari resides, and she soon finds she will follow him anywhere – into his isolated, characterless home, and into the delicately balanced world of pain and eroticism where he leads her. Their insular relationship becomes a secret that takes over her life, until a visitor arrives to share in the translator’s affections and shifts the dynamic of their union into dangerous territory.

With a sense of place so strong you can smell the ocean and trace the seashells with your fingers, Ogawa creates a novel of seductive power and turns the heat and sunshine of a Japanese summer town into an oppressive and ominous world of violence and degradation.