House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories
- Mar 4, 2022
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 13
★★★☆☆
Short stories are curious things. Some authors excel at them, some use them as an opportunity for experimentation and chance-taking, some as a venue for ideas too small in scope for a longer format, while still others use them as a way to release the leftover energy and momentum at the completion of a novel. Having read nearly all of Yasunari Kawabata’s great works, including Snow Country, The Master of Go, Thousand Cranes, The Sound of the Mountain, and Beauty and Sadness, but never before any of his shorter fiction, I didn’t know what kind of short story writer he would be. Of course, no writer falls into any one of the above categories, and, here Kawabata shows sides of himself both familiar and less familiar to readers of his novels.
“House of the Sleeping Beauties,” the longest of the three stories in this collection, is, in all regards, quintessentially Kawabata. It is the story of an older man, Eguchi, who begins to frequent the titular house, wherein men, generally older than he (and, as intimated, too old to perform sexually), spend the night with a young woman who has been induced into a deep, unwakeable sleep. It’s a fascinating, if slightly disturbing, premise that illuminates the contrasts between young and old, vitality and infirmity, purity and impurity. Its abrupt, unexpected end is not so much shocking as it is frustrating, a reminder that in short stories there can often be few places to go.
The second story, “One Arm,” is somewhat bizarre; more Franz Kafka or Kōbō Abe than typical Kawabata. In it, a young woman gives the protagonist, an older man, though not nearly so old as Eguchi, her arm for the night. He races home with it, engages it in conversation, and, ultimately, replaces one of his own arms with it.
The last of the three stories, “Of Birds and Beasts,” is that of a man who prefers the company of animals to people, and though he is a caretaker, if that’s the right word, to a number of birds and dogs, he often does so with little compassion or concern. In fact, he frequently neglects them, and though he sometimes attempts to save them when they’re sick, injured, or dying, just as often he abandons them or ushers them to their demise—only to replace them with fresh specimens and repeat the cycle again.
All three stories share Kawabata’s penchant for melancholia, but they also share something deeper: the prospect that youth possessed is youth regained. That the answer is “no” doesn’t stop one from trying, and in House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories, Kawabata gives us three intriguing, if not classic, explorations of the idea.
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