4 ideas
Seventeen-year-old Mari works the desk at her domineering mother's run-down seaside hotel. She hears an elderly Russian translator's commanding voice as he is thrown out of a room after a dispute with a prostitute, and she follows him. She begins secretly taking the ferry to his island house, where he ties and dominates her while writing her formal, courtly letters, until the affair is exposed and he drowns himself in the sea.
In letters and in public the translator is formal, fastidious and tender, but alone with Mari he humiliates and hurts her. The two registers do not cancel each other out. The politeness frames and heightens the cruelty, and the cruelty lends the politeness its charge, so the same man is sincerely both.
Mari's mother controls her body and time daily, down to oiling and tightly binding her hair and keeping her at the hotel desk. Read this way, Mari's surrender to the translator is less a new subjugation than the first control she has chosen and hidden for herself. Being dominated becomes a way to take ownership of her own body away from the mother.
Each crossing turns Mari from the dutiful daughter into the secret lover, so geography holds her double life apart. The affair can last only as long as the water keeps the two selves separate, and its collapse and the translator's death both happen at the sea.