Yasunari Kawabata: The House of the Sleeping Beauties

Old Eguchi was wide awake and did not seem likely to go to sleep. He did not want to remember women other than the girl who had looked at the little rainbows. Nor did he want to touch the sleeping girl, to look at her naked. Turning face down, he again opened the packet at his pillow. The woman of the inn had said that it was sleeping medicine, but Eguchi hesitated. He did not know what it would be, whether or not it would be the medicine the girl had been given. He took one pill in his mouth, and washed it down with a goo amount of water. Perhaps because he was used to a bedtime drink but not to sleeping medicine, he was quickly pulled into sleep. He had a dream.

He was in the embrace of a woman, but she had four legs. The four legs were entwined about him. She had arms as well. Though half awaken he thought the four legs odd, but nor repulsive. Those four legs, so much more provocative than two, were still with him. It was a medicine to make one have such dreams, he thought absently. The girl had turned away from him, her hips toward him. He seemed to find something touching about the fact that her head was more distant than her hips. Half asleep and half awake, he took the long hair spread out toward him and played with it as if to comb it. And so he fell asleep.

His next dream was most pleasant. One of his daughters had borne a deformed child in a hospital. Awake, the old man could not remember what sort of deformity it had been. Probably he did not want to remember. It was hideous, in any case. The baby was immediately taken from the mother. It was behind a white curtain in the maternity room, and she went over and commenced hacking it to pieces, getting it ready to throw away. The doctor, a friend of Eguchi's, was standing beside her in white. Eguchi was too beside her. He was wide awake now, groaning from the horror of it. The crimson velvet on the four walls so startled him that he put his hands to his face and rubbed his forehead. It had been a horrible nightmare. Was it that, having come in search of misshapen pleasure, he had had a misshapen dream? He did not know which of this three daughters he had dreamed of, and he did not try to know. All three had borne quite normal babies.

Eguchi would have wanted to leave if it had been possible. But he took the other pill, to fall into a deeper sleep. The cold water passed down his throat. The girl still had her back to him. Thinking that she might – it was not impossible – bear the ugliest and most doltish of children, he put his hand to the roundness at her shoulder.

"Look this way."

As if in answer she turned over. One of her hands fell on his chest. One leg came toward him, as if trembling in the cold. So warm a girl could not be cold. From her mouth or her nose, he could not be sure which, came a small voice.

"Are you having a nightmare too?" he asked.

But old Eguchi was quick to sink into the depths of sleep.

Old Eguchi had not thought that he would again go to the 'house of the sleeping beauties.' He had not thought when he spent that first night there that he would like to go again. So it had been too when he left in the morning.

It was about a fortnight later that a telephone call came asking whether he might like to pay a visit that night. The voice seemed to be that of the woman in her forties. Over the telephone it sounded even more like a cold whisper from a silent place.

"If you leave now, when may I hope to see you?"

"A little after nine, I'd imagine."

"That will be too soon. The young lady is to here yet, and even if she were she would not be asleep."

Startled, Eguchi did not answer.

"I should have her asleep by eleven. I'll be waiting for you any time after that."

The woman's speech was slow and calm, but Eguchi's heart raced.

"About eleven, then." he said, his throat dry.

What does it matter whether she's asleep or not, he should have been able to say, not seriously, perhaps, but half in jest. He would have liked to meet her before she went to sleep, he could have said. But somehow the words caught in his throat. He had come up against the secret rule of the house. Because it was such a strange rule, it had to be followed all the more strictly. Once it was broken, the place became no more than an ordinary bawdy house. The sad requests of the old men, allurements, all disappeared. Eguchi himself was startled at the fact that he had caught his breath so sharply upon being told that nine was too early, that the girl would not be asleep, that the woman would haver her asleep by eleven. Might it be called the surprise of suddenly being pulled away from the every day world? For the girl could be asleep and certain not to awake up.

Was he too quick or slow, going again after a fortnight to a house he had not thought to revisit? He had not, in any case, resisted the temptation by force of will. He had not meant to indulge again in this sort of ugly senile dalliance, and in fact he was not yet as senile as the other men who visited the place. And yet that first visit had not left behind ugly memories. The guilt was there. But he felt that he had not in all his sixty-seven years spent another night so clean. So he still felt when he awoke in the morning. The sleeping medicine had worked, it seemed, and he had slept until eight, later than usual. No part of him was touching the girl. It was a sweet, childlike awakening, in her young warmth and soft scent.

The girl had lain with her face toward him, her head very slightly forward and her breasts back, and in the shadow of her jaw there had been a scarcely perceptible line across the fresh, slender neck. Her long hair was spread over the pillow behind her. Looking up from the neatly closed lips, he had gazed at her eyebrows and eyelashes and had not doubted that she was a virgin. She was too near fir his old eyes ti make out the individual hairs if the eyelashes and eyebrows. Her skin, on which he could not see the fuzz, glowed softly. There was not a single mole on the face and neck. He had forgotten the nightmare, and as affection for the girl poured through him. there came over him too a childlike feeling that he was loved by the girl. He felt for a breast, and held it softly in his hand. There was in the touch a strange flicker of something, as if this were the breast of Eguchi's own mother before she had him inside her. He withdrew his hand, but the sensation went from his chest to his shoulders.

He heard the door to the next room open.

"Are you awake?" Asked the woman of the house. "I have breakfast ready."

"Yes."

Raising himself, Eguchi softly touched the girl's hair, He knew that the woman was sending the customer away before the girl awoke, but she was calm as she served him breakfast. Until when had the girl been put to sleep? But it would not do to ask unnecessary questions.

"A very pretty girl." He said nonchalantly.

"Yes. And did you have pleasant dreams?"

"It brought me pleasant dreams."

"The wind and the waves have quieted down." The woman changed the subject. "It will be what they call Indian Summer."

And now, coming a second time in half a month, Eguchi did not feel the curiosity of the earlier visit so much as reticence and a certain discomfort. But the excitement was also stronger. The impatience if the wait from nine to eleven had brought in a certain intoxication.

The same woman unlocked the gate for him. The same reproduction was in the alcove. The tea was again good. He was more nervous than on his earlier visit, but he managed to behave like an old and experienced customer.

"It's so warm hereabouts… " he said, looking around at the picture of the mountain village in autumn leaves "… that I imagine the maple leaves wither without really turning red. But then it was dark, and I didn't really get a good look at your garden."