<商品の説明>より Both very weird and very good... Image by perfect image, we are led down into a mysterious and gripping universe, simultaneously beautiful and terrifying... From the opening sentences of Hotel Iris you know that every word will count and that every scene will be the occasion for strong and strange feeling (Times Literary Supplement)
p1~2 <ONE>
He first came to the Iris one day just before the beginning of the summer season. The rain had been falling since dawn. It grew heavier at dusk, and the sea was rough and gray. A gust blew open the door. and rain soaked the carpet in the lobby. The shopkeepers in the neighborhood had turned off their neon signs along the empty streets. A car passed from time to time, its headlights shining through the raindrops.
I was about to lock up the cash register and turn out the lights in the lobby, when I head something heavy hitting the floor above, followed by a woman's scream. It was a very long scream- solong that I started to wonder before it ended whether she wasn't laughing instead.
“Filthy pervert!”The scream stopped at last, and a woman came flying out of Room 202. “You disgusting old man!”She caught her foot on a seam in the carpet and fell on the landing, but she went on hurling insults at the door of the room.“What do you think I am? You're not fit to be with a woman like me! Scumbag! Importent bastard!”
She was obviosly a prostitute -even I could tell that much- and no longer young. Frizzy hair hung at her wrinkled neck, and thick, shiny lipstick had smeared onto her chooks. Her mascara had run, and her left breast hung out of her blouse where the buttons had come undone.
Pale pink thighs protruded from a short skirt, markeded in places with red scratches. She had lost one of her cheap plastic high heels.