Frans Wachtmeister: “I Carry Anger Toward All of Japan”

Frans Wachtmeister does not want to think about how long he has lived in Japan. Twelve years? Thirteen? It has been a long time, at any rate. Japan provided the setting for his first two novels, “Territoriella anspråk,” published in 2023, and “Förlorad mark,” which followed two years later.

Now he returns with “Livsrum,” published by Norstedts rather than his previous publisher, Ellerströms. The setting has changed too. The story travels from Staffanstorp in Skåne to Sharm el-Sheikh on Egypt’s Red Sea coast.

The shift sounds dramatic. Wachtmeister describes the first two novels as “two sides of the same coin,” both following a gloomy young Western man scraping by in Tokyo. “Livsrum,” he says, is something else. Yet one concern remains: the consequences of globalization.

“I want to believe that a shared motif is the human being and territory,” he says. “What it does to you, how you make a place your own, how you conquer a place or merge into it. I find that interesting. And of course it is about having lived here in Tokyo as a foreigner for so long.”

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I want to believe that a shared motif is the human being and territory. What it does to you, how you make a place your own, how you conquer a place or merge into it. I find that interesting. And of course it is about having lived here in Tokyo as a foreigner for so long.

The new novel centers on Erika, who runs Residenset, a guesthouse in Sharm el-Sheikh aimed at Western sex tourists. Heterosexual women, and eventually homosexual men, come there for extravagance and temporary relationships with the male hotel staff. The concierges receive little pay, because the business expects guests to spoil their lovers. The possibility of being taken to Europe is meant to make the men compete for attention.

Sex is not the whole business model. Erika is an art historian specializing in the neoclassical period of architect Ivar Tengbom, before he became a functionalist. She imagines Residenset as a trip into the world of yesterday, the early 20th century before European empires fought one another and lost their colonies to rebellious local populations. The relatively new hotel is filled with antiques and curiosities, while staff wear period clothing.

Erika insists that suggestion is the key to the enterprise, and doubts that its potential audience is narrow. “Regardless of orientation and political affiliation,” she says, “there is no conviction that unites...”

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Regardless of orientation and political affiliation, there is no conviction that unites...