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(Copied from an old review originally posted elsewhere.)
Date: 12 October 1994, 08:05:49 EST
From: David M. Chess
Newsgroups: alt.books.reviews,rec.arts.books
Subject: Kawabata's "House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories"
Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel prize for literature in 1968. His best known work is a novel, _Snow Country_, that I haven't read. I picked up "House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories" in my favorite good-literature store. The three stories it contains are powerful and disturbing pictures of alienation of various kinds; from the Other, from the self, from life.
The first and longest story, House of the Sleeping Beauties, reminds me of Jerzy Kosinski's "Steps". A tiny world without love or self-knowledge is drawn in compact, lucid prose. And here and there we find a gem, lost in the wilderness. This, for instance:
He closed his eyes, probably in nothing more than the sadness of an old man touching the hands of a sleeping young girl. He heard the first drops of night rain falling on the quiet sea.
is marvelous. But also deeply disturbing: this is not a grandfather and his granddaughter, this is an old man who has paid to spend a night (chaste but lecherous) in bed with a young woman drugged into insensibility. We see from this man's viewpoint (the story is in the third person, but the viewpoint is strongly first), as he spends a number of nights in this house, and his strange truncated relationships with the sleeping women bring up memories and ideas from his unlovely past.
The second story, "One Arm", is another tale, odd and surreal, of a partial and truncated relationship. A young woman removes her right arm, and gives it to the first-person narrator to keep for the night. We follow him as he takes it home, speaks to it, caresses it, and even replaces his own right arm with it. Again, a strange and partial relationship with a young woman brings up memories and detached inchoate emotions. Unlike "House of the Sleeping Beauties", "One Arm" is short and almost punchy, but they are definitely set in the same spiritual landscape.
Both "House of the Sleeping Beauties" and "One Arm" use young women as figures of what one can be alientated from. They are romantic in some of the medieval sense; women are a mysterious Other Country, and in dealing with the mystery of that country, male protagonists figure themselves. In the last story, "Of Birds and Beasts", people are almost entirely absent. The only human characters besides the protagonist (like "House", "Of Birds and Beasts" is a third-person story with a first-person viewpoint) is a maid (who is almost unseen, although crucial), and an ex-lover who is now a dancer. Detachment from the other humans in his life is assumed, part of the background. The body of the story is in the alienation between the man and the birds and animals that he keeps and cares for, and ultimately between the man and life, the man and himself. There is in the man's keeping and tending the animals a certain longing for life, but he comes nowhere near acknowledging that longing, or touching that life, and the various outcomes are bleak (one would not want to be an animal owned by this man). Or the story can be read at another level, as actually about the relationship between the man and his ex-lover, but seen through the lens of the animals, because it cannot be touched directly. I'm not good at those deep readings, though... *8)
This is not light stuff, and not escapist in the sense of escape to an easier world. But if you are attracted by the idea of escape into a difficult landscape, clearly drawn and spare, but disturbingly real, you may enjoy these stories.
%A Kabawata, Yasunari %B House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories %T House of the Sleeping Beauties %T One Arm %T Of Birds and Beasts %I Kodansha International %C New York %D 1980 (copyright 1969) %G 0-87011-426-3 %P 149 pp.
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