The House of the Sleeping Beauties by Yasunari Kawabata

First published:Nemureru bijo, 1960-1961, serial; 1961, book (English translation, 1969)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1960

Locale: An unnamed hot-spring resort in Japan

Principal Characters:

• Yoshio Eguchi, a visitor to an inn at which older men pay to sleep beside drugged young women
• Kiga, the friend who tells Eguchi about the inn
• The Woman, the unnamed manager of the establishment
• Six sleeping Beauties, all anonymous, with whom Eguchi spends five nights

The Novel

The House of the Sleeping Beauties focuses on Yoshio Eguchi, aged sixty-seven, who visits an inn at a Japanese hot-spring resort in order to sleep beside one or another beautiful young woman. The establishment caters to elderly gentlemen who have lost their sexual powers, and the rules of the place explicitly forbid a customer to initiate sexual contact. A girl is drugged, stripped naked, and put to bed in a room hung with red velvet curtains before an old man sees her, and she remains asleep until her customer leaves the next morning. The five chapters of Yasunari Kawabata’s novella correspond to Eguchi’s five visits to the inn. They trace his search, through memories prompted by the presence of each of the six girls beside whom he sleeps, for understanding of his own imperfect nature and for acceptance of his eventual death.

Eguchi’s five visits to the inn occur from autumn to midwinter during a single year, reinforcing the metaphysical thrust of the novel. The girls next to whom he sleeps are alive, responsive to stimulus, but so heavily drugged that he cannot awaken them. Eguchi sees them as corpses; he calls their sleep a form of death. Sensitive to the color, texture, and scent of each girl’s body, he finds the experience of lying next to the girls a stimulus to his memory. The patterning of Eguchi’s recollections seems random, prompted by the process of association which causes him to think, for example, of the scent of a nursing mother when he joins the first girl in bed one stormy autumn evening. In fact, Eguchi’s memories run roughly parallel to the stages of human life. His thoughts during his evening with the first girl relate to innocence, new life, and birth. The things Eguchi contemplates during his final evening at the inn,the one time he has two companions, center on death, life’s final experience.

The men patronizing the inn, unlike the girls who work there, are alert throughout their hours in the curtained room. Nevertheless, they too are living corpses, as all men and women are, and it is only a matter of time before one of the inn’s patrons dies in the bed of one of the young women. The body is removed to a neighboring inn, one with no secrets to hide, and the facts are concealed to protect the dead man’s reputation and the feelings of his family. Eguchi’s friend Kiga hears of the death, however, and so Eguchi discusses it with the manager on the evening of his fifth visit. This time, he finds two young women asleep in the curtained room, one of them dark and the other fair, and after Eguchi considers using force to prove his virility on the dark girl, he discovers that she seems to have stopped breathing. The manager removes the girl’s body, denying that she is actually dead, and reminds Eguchi that the fair girl is still in bed. “The covers were as they had been, thrown back in confusion, and the naked form of the fair girl lay in shining beauty.” The reader is not told if Eguchi gets back into bed with her.

The Characters

The significant action of The House of the Sleeping Beauties occurs within Eguchi’s consciousness; the girls at the inn neither act nor speak. Eguchi assigns each one a personality based on her physical characteristics and the events in his past that she recalls for him. He does speak with the unnamed woman who runs the inn. The manager is a self-disciplined, unnaturally quiet person, more an emanation of the closely guarded house than an actual woman. She refuses Eguchi’s repeated requests for the medication which puts the girls to sleep. This request, like his repeated fantasy of sexually assaulting one of the sleeping girls or strangling her, reflects the internal tensions at work in Eguchi’s mind. Initially, he sees his visits to the inn as ways of both affirming and denying the fact that, like most of the place’s customers, he is losing his sexual powers. Eguchi repeatedly insists that, unlike the other men, he is still virile and capable of sexual activity. As time passes and Eguchi encounters a different young woman on each of his visits, the emphasis shifts from the sexual dimension of his dilemma to its moral and spiritual ramifications.

Eguchi both fears death and is attracted to it. He uses his experiences at the inn, and the memories that the girls evoke, both to assert his own vitality and to face the emptiness of most of the encounters between men and women. He recalls a youthful trip to Kyoto with a girl he did not marry, an affair with a woman married to a foreigner, and his youngest daughter’s marriage to the young man who did not take her virginity. Sexual activity, however pleasurable in itself, seems merely evidence of attachment to the world of human experience. Eguchi finds himself looking at the sleeping beauties beside him and speculating upon the motives leading girls in their teens and twenties to sell themselves to men such as him, and he considers the lives that these girls are likely to lead once they are too old for so innocent a form of prostitution. There is a tradition in Japanese folklore, and Eguchi refers to it, in which prostitutes are incarnations of the Buddha. If the dark girl to whom he is attracted at the end of the novel represents sensuality, the fair girl represents an inviolate purity with certain religious overtones. Eguchi may be choosing between them when he finds the dark girl dead beside him and turns from her to the shining, fair one asleep on his other side.

Kawabata’s handling of the sleeping beauties (the literal meaning of the book’s title in Japanese) is nothing short of masterful. Lacking knowledge of the men who kiss and fondle them, these girls remain uncorrupted by the experience. They vary in age and appearance, but all manifest the eternal woman. Eguchi sees them as embodiments of life’s complexity. His memories of the women he has loved, prompted by the six girls, confirm both his pleasure in his own sexual capacity and his recognition of his moral and spiritual emptiness. Like the Buddha, the sleeping beauties lead Eguchi to self-knowledge. Unwaking themselves, they awaken him.

Critical Context

The process of Eguchi’s enlightenment in this novel is typical of Kawabata’s fiction. Similar old men struggle against aging and learn to welcome death in Meijin (1942-1954; The Master of Go, 1972) and Yama no oto (1954; The Sound of the Mountain, 1970). Also typical is Eguchi’s wistful attraction to innocent young girls. This is the subject of Izu no odoriko (1926; The Izu Dancer, 1955), Kawabata’s first novella, and he returned to it in Yukiguni (1947; Snow Country, 1956) and Sembazuru (1952; Thousand Cranes, 1958).

Less characteristic is the tightness of the novel’s construction and its sense of completeness. Most of Kawabata’s fiction was produced serially, often over long periods of time, and he often returned to earlier material to rework or add to it. The House of the Sleeping Beauties, by contrast, was written in a relatively short time, and it does not seem open-ended in the way that Snow Country and Thousand Cranes do. Eguchi’s story is perhaps Kawabata’s most thorough analysis, and certainly his most explicit, of the male character type he favored as protagonist. It is also a good example of his treatment of the effects of sexually innocent women on that kind of man.

When Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, his ability to convey in fiction the feel of an older way of life in Japan was singled out for comment. On the surface, this is less true of The House of the Sleeping Beauties, with its emphasis on the psychology of sexual attraction, than of other of Kawabata’s novels. Nevertheless, in the light of the explicitly Buddhist focus of Eguchi’s growing understanding of himself, this novella also becomes a book about a traditional aspect of Japanese culture.

Bibliography

Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era, 1984.

Lippit, Noriko. Reality and Fiction in Modern Japanese Literature, 1980.

Petersen, Gwenn Boardman. The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima, 1979.

Ueda, Makoto. Modern Japanese Writers and the Nature of Literature, 1976.

Yamanouchi, Hisaaki. The Search for Authenticity in Modern Japanese Literature, 1978.