BOOK (1996)

Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa (Harvill Secker)

If you're going to write about a sadomasochistic sexual relationship between an elderly man and a 17-year-old girl, you have to be a) female, and b) a brilliant writer. Thankfully, Yoko Ogawa is both.

Indeed, Ogawa has won many of Japan's most prestigious writing awards over the years, including the Tanizaki, Akutagawa and Yomiuri Prizes. And in Hotel Iris she is on top, unsettling form, giving us a reverse-Lolita story narrated by the teenager rather than the older man.

After her father dies, Mari finds herself trapped in something of a Cinderella-like role, toiling away in a crummy seaside hotel, in emotional bondage to the boss - her stingy and cruel mother, who is aided and abetted by a spiteful and kleptomaniac maid.

The hotel has seen better days, although it is still frequented by many of the unnamed Japanese town's prostitutes. When one of them gets into a fight with a male guest, Mari suddenly finds a new father figure. And a weird, disturbing friendship begins.

'Get away from the creep,' one yells silently as the tale unfolds. But the youngster won't pay attention to anything except her own peculiar attraction to a man about 50 years her senior who lives in a tiny hovel on a remote islet, where he works as a freelance translator of Russian. But when he entices Mari over to his pad, he gets to work on her instead. And by conveying the almost-impossible-to-describe, Ogawa depicts a disturbing sexual awakening.