Name: The House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories
Rating: 4.333333333333333 (3 reviews)
ISBN: 9780525434139

Yasunari Kawabata

Three surreal, erotically charged stories from Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata. In the three long tales in this collection, Yasunari Kawabata examines the boundaries between fantasy and reality in the minds of three lonely men. Piercing examinations of sexuality and human psychology--and works of remarkable subtlety and beauty--these stories showcase one of the twentieth century's great writers--in any language--at his very best.

The House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories

Irem

From Japan's first Nobel laureate for literature, three superb stories explore the interplay between erotic fantasy and reality in a loner's mind. Kawabata's fiction is noted for combining a traditional Japanese aesthetic with modernist, often surreal trends: his richly lyrical prose is imbued with a sense of loneliness and alienation. In these three tales, underlying the erotic fantasy is the protagonists' lack of connection with other people, and their memories of past loves in an empty sterile life. The title story, "House of the Sleeping Beauties," is about a man who visits a brothel where elderly men can spend a chaste but lecherous night with a drugged, unconscious virgin. As he admires the girl's beauty, he recalls his past womanizing, and reflects on the relentless course of old age. In "One Arm," a young girl removes her right arm and gives it to the narrator to take home for the night, a surreal seduction follows as he speaks to it, tries to allay its fears, caresses it and even replaces his own right arm with it. "Of Birds and Beasts" is about a man who lives alone, with a housemaid, preferring the company of the birds and dogs he keeps to human beings. But rather than living animals, these are beautiful objects which, although they give him pleasure, he treats with casual cruelty, in much the same way as he treated his previous lover, a dancer. Beautiful yet chilling, poetic yet subtly disturbing, these stories make compelling reading.

The House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories

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