The House of the Sleeping Beauties

by Yasunari Kawabata

  Old Eguchi slipped in beside her. He was careful not to touch her. She did not move. But her warmth, different from the warmth of the electric blanket, enveloped him. It was like a wild and undeveloped warmth. Perhaps the smell of her hair and skin made him think so, but it was not only that.

  "Sixteen or so, maybe?" he muttered to himself.

  It was a house frequented by old men who could no longer use women as women. But Eguchi, on his third visit, knew that to sleep with such a girl was a fleeting consolation, the pursuit of a vanished happiness in being alive. And were there among them old men who secretly asked to be a sadness in a young girl's body that called up in an old man a longing for death. But perhaps Eguchi was, among the old men who came to the house, one of the more easily moved. And perhaps most of them but wanted to drink in the youth of girls put to sleep, to enjoy girls who would not awaken.

  At his pillow there were again two white sleeping tablets. He took them up and looked at them. They bore no marks or letters to tell him what the drug might be. It was without doubt different from the drug the girl had taken. He thought of asking on his next visit for the same drug. It was not likely that the request would be granted. But how would it be to sleep as of the dead? He was much taken with the thought of sleeping a deathlike sleep beside the girl put into a sleep like death.

  'A sleep like death': the words brought back a memory of a woman. Three years before, in the spring, Eguchi had brought a woman bak to his hotel in Kobe. She was from a night club, and it was of the dead? He was much taken with the thought of sleeping a deathlike sleep beside a girl put into a sleep like death.

  "A sleep like death." The words brought back a memory of a woman. Three years before, in the spring, Eguchi had brought a woman back to his hotel in Kobe. She was from a night club, and it was past midnight. He had a drink of whisky from a bottle he kept in his room and offered some to the woman. She drank as much as he. He changed to the night kimono provided by the hotel. There was none for her. He took her in his arms still in her underwear.

  He was gently and aimlessly stroking her back.

  She pulled herself up. "I can't sleep in these." She took off all her cloths and threw them on the chair in front of the mirror. He was surprised, but told himself that such was the way with amateurs. She was unusually docile.

  "Not yet?" he asked as he pulled away from her.

  "You cheat, Mr. Eguchi." She said it twice. "You cheat." But still she was quiet and docile.

  The whisky had its effect, and the old man was soon asleep. A feeling that the woman was already out of the bed awoke him in the morning. She was at the mirror arranging her hair.

  "You're early."

  "Because I have children."

  "Children?"

  "Two of them. Still very small."

  She hurried away before he was out of bed.

  It seemed strange that she, the first slender and firm fleshed woman he had embraced in a long while, should have two children. Hers had not been that sort of a body. Nor had it seemed likely that those breasts had nursed a child.

  He opened his suitcase to take out a clean shirt, and saw that everything had been neatly put in order for him. In the course of his ten days' stay he had wadded his dirty linen and stuffed it inside, and stirred up the contents in search of something at the bottom, and tossed in gifts he had bought and received in Kobe. And the suitcase had so swelled up that it would no longer close. She had been able to look inside, and she had seem the confusion when he opened it for cigarettes. But even so, what had made her want to put it in order for him? And when had she done the work? All of his dirty underwear and the like was neatly folded. It must have taken time, even fir a woman's skilled hands. Had she done it, unable to sleep herself, after Eguchi had gone to sleep?

  "Well…" said Eguchi, gazing at the neat suitcase. "I wonder what made her do it?"

  The next evening, as promised, the woman arrived to meet him at a Japanese restaurant. She was wearing Japanese kimono.

  "You wear kimono?"

  "Sometimes. But I don't imagine I look very good in it."

  She laughed a different laugh. "I had a call from my friend at about noon. She said she was shocked. She asked if it was all right."

  "You told her?"

  "I don't keep secrets."

  They walked through the city. Eguchi bought her material for a kimono and obi, and they went back to the hotel. From the window they could see the lights of a ship in the harbour. As they stood kissing in the window, Eguchi closed the blinds and pulled the curtains. He offered whisky to the woman, but she shook her head. She did not want to lose control of herself. She sank into a deep sleep. She awoke the next morning as Eguchi was getting out of bed.

  "I slept as if I were dead. I really slept as if I were dead."

  She lay still, her eyes open. They were misty, washed clean.

  She knew that he would be going back to Tokyo today. She had married when her husband was in the Kobe office of a foreign company. He had been in Singapore for two years now. Next month he would be back in Kobe. She had told Eguchi all this the night befire. He had not known that she was married, and married to a foreigner. He had had no trouble luring her from the night club. He had gone there on the whim of a moment, and at the next table there had been two Occidental men and four Japanese women. The middle aged woman among them was an acquaintance of Eguchi's, and she greeted him. She was apparently acting as guide fir the men. When the two men got up to dance, she asked whether he would not like to dance with the other young woman. Halfway through the second dance he suggested that they go out. It was as if she were embarking in a mischievous frolic. She readily came to the hotel, and when they were in his room, Eguchi was the one who felt the greater strain.

  And so it was that Eguchi had an affair with a married woman, a foreigner's wife. She had left her children with a nurse or governess, and she did not show the reticence one might expect of a married woman. And so the feeling of having misbehaved was not strong. Certain pangs of conscience lingered on all the same. But the happiness of hearing her say that she had slept as if she were dead stayed with him like youthful music. Eguchi was sixty four at the time, the woman perhaps in her middle or late twenties. Such had been the difference in their ages that Eguchi had thought it probably his last affair with a young woman. In the course of only two nights, of a single night, indeed, the woman who had slept as if dead had become an unforgettable woman. She had written saying that when he was next in Kobe she would like to see him again. A note a month later told him that her husband had come back, but that she would like to see him again all the same. There was a similar note yet a month later, He heard no more.

  "Well." Old Eguchi muttered to himself. "She got herself pregnant again, with her third one. No doubt about it." It was three years later, as he lay beside a small girl who had been out into a sleep like death, that the thought came to him.

  It had not come to him before. Eguchi was puzzled that it should have come now. But the more he turned it over in his mind the surer he was that it was a fact. Had she stopped writing because she was pregnant? He was on the edge of a smile. He felt calm and reposed, as if her welcoming her husband back from Singapore and then getting pregnant had washed away the impropriety. And fond image of the woman's body came before him. It brought no stirrings of lust. The firm, smooth, tall body was like a symbol of young womanhood. Her pregnancy was but a sudden working of his imagination, but he did not doubt it to be a fact.

  "Do you like me?"

  "Yes, I like you. That's the question all woman ask."

  "But…" She did not go on to finish the sentence.

  "Aren't you going to ask what it is like about you?"

  "Al right. I won't say any more."

  But the question made it clear to him that he did like her. He had forgotten it even now, three years later. The mother of three children, would she still have a body like that if a woman who had had none? Fondness for the woman flowed over him.
r />   It was as if he had forgotten the girl beside him, the girl who had been put to sleep. But it was she who had made him think of the Kobe woman. The arm bent with the hand against the cheek was in his way. He grasped it by the wrist and stretched it out under the quilt. Too warm from the electric blanket, she had pushed it down to her shoulder blades. The small fresh roundness of the shoulders was so near as almost to brush against his eyes. He wanted to see whether he could take a shoulder in the palm of one hand, but held back. The flesh was not rich enough to hide the shoulder blades. He wanted to stroke them, but again held back. He gently brushed aside the hair over her right cheek. The sleeping face was soft in the gentle light from the ceiling and the crimson curtains. Nothing had been done to the eyebrows. The eyelashes were even, and so long that he could have taken them between his fingers. The lower lip thickened slightly toward the center. He could not see her teeth.

  For Eguchi when he came to this house, there was nothing more beautiful than a young face in dreamless sleep. Might it be called the sweetest consolation to be found in this world? No woman, however beautiful, could conceal her age when she was at her best asleep. Or perhaps this house chose girls whose sleeping faces were particularly beautiful. He felt his life, his troubles over the years, fade away as he gazed at her small face. It wood have been a happy night had he even now taken the tablets and gone off to sleep. But he lay quietly, his eyes closed. He did not want to sleep… for the girl, having made him remember the woman in Kobe, might bring other memories too.

  The thought that the young wife in Kobe, having welcomed her husband back after two years, had immediately become pregnant, and the intense feeling, as if the inevitable, that it had to be the case were not quick to leave Eguchi. It seemed to him that the affair had gone nothing to sully the child the woman had carried. The pregnancy and the birth were a reality and a blessing. Young life was at work in the woman, telling him all the more of his age. But why had she quietly given herself to him, without resistance and without restraint? It was, he thought, something that had not happened before in all his near seventy years. There had been nothing in her of the whore or the profligate. He had less sense of guilt, indeed, than he now had in this house, beside the girl so strangely put to sleep. Still in bed, he had watched with pleasure and approval as the woman quietly hurried off to the small children awaiting her. Probably the last young woman in his life, she had become unforgettable, and he did not think that she would have forgotten him. Though the affair would remain a secret throughout their lives, leaving no deep cuts, he did not think that either of them would forget.

  But it was strange that this girl in training as a 'sleeping beauty' should have brought back the Kobe woman so vividly. He opened his eyes. He stroked her eye slashes gently. She frowned and turned away, and her lips parted. Her tongue shrank downwards, as if withdrawing into her lower jaw. There was a pleasing hollow down the precise center of the childlike tongue. He was tempted. He peered into the opened mouth. If he were to throttle her, would there be spasms along the small tongue? He remembered how, long before, he had known a prostitute even younger than this girl. His own tastes were rather different, but she was the one who had been allotted to him by his host. She used her long, thin tongue. It was watery, and Eguchi was not pleased. From the town came sounds of drum and flute that made one's heart beat faster. It seemed to be a festival night. The girl had almond eyes and a spirited face. She rushed ahead, despite the fact that she obviously had no interest in her customer.

  "The festival." said Eguchi. "I imagine you're in a hurry to get to the festival."

  "Why, you're exactly right. You've hit the nail on the head. It was on my way with a friend, and them I got called here."

  "All right." he said, avoiding the cold, watery tongue. "Be on your way again. The drums are coming from a shrine, I suppose."

  "But the woman here will scold me."

  …

  The girl tonight was perhaps two or three years older than the other, and her body was more a woman's. The great difference was that she had been put to sleep and would not awaken. If festival drums were echoing tonight she would not hear them.

  Straining his ears, he thought he could hear a faint late autumn wind blowing down over the hills behind the house. The warm breath from the girl's small parted lips came to his face. The dim light from the crimson velvet curtains flowed down inside her mouth. It did not seem to him that the girl's tongue would like the others's, cold and watery. The temptation was still strong. This girl was the first of the 'sleeping beauties' who had shown him her tongue. The impulse toward a misdeed more exciting than putting a finger to her tongue flashed through him.

  But the misdeed did not take clear shape in Eguchi's mind as cruelty and terror. The affairs with the Kobe woman and the fourteen year old prostitute, for instance, were of but a moment in a long life, and they flowed away in a moment. To marry, to rear his daughters, these things were on the surface good. But to have had the long years in his power, to have controlled their lives, to have warped their natures even, these might be evil things. Perhaps, beguiled by custom and order, one's sense of evil went numb.

  Lying beside a girl who had been put to sleep was doubtless evil. The evil would become clearer were he to kill her. It would be easy to strangle her, or to cover her nose and mouth. She was asleep with her mouth open, showing her childlike tongue. It was a tongue that seemed likely to curl around his finger, were he to touch it, like that of a babe at its mother's breast. He put his hand to her jaw and upper lip and closed her mouth. When he took it away the mouth fell open again. In the lips parted in sleep, the old man saw youth.

  The fact of her being so very young nay have caused the impulse to flash through him. But it seemed to him that among the old men who secretly came to this 'house of sleeping beauties', there must be some who not only looked wistfully back to the vanished past but sought to forget the evil they had done through their lives. Old Kiga, who had introduced Eguchi to the house, had of course not revealed the secrets of the others guests. There were probably only a few of them. Eguchi could imagine that they were worldly successes. But among them must be some who had made their successes by wrongdoing and kept their gains by repeated wrongdoing. They would be among the defeated, rather… victims of terror. In their hearts as they lay against the flesh of naked young girls put to sleep would be more than fear of approaching death and regret for their lost youth. There might also be remorse, and the turmoil so common in the families of the successful. They would have no Buddha before whom to kneel. The naked girl would know nothing, would not open her eyes, of one of the old men were to hold her tight in his arms, shed cold tears, even sob and wail. The old man need feel no shame, no damage to his pride. The regrets and the sadness could flow quite freely. And might not the 'sleeping beauty' herself be a Buddha of sorts? And she was flesh and blood. Her young skin and scent might be forgiveness for the sad old men.

  Old Eguchi quietly closed his eyes as these thoughts came to him. It seemed a little strange that, among the three 'sleeping beauties' he had been with, the one tonight, the smallest and youngest, quite inexperienced, should have called them up. He took her in his arms, enveloped her. Until then he had avoided touching her. Drained the strength, she did not resist. She was pathetically slight. She may have felt Eguchi even from the depths of sleep. She closed her mouth. Her hips, thrust forward, came against him roughly.

  What sort of life would she have, he wondered. Would it be a quiet and peaceful one, even though she achieved no great eminence? He hoped that she would find happiness for having given comfort to the old men here. He almost thought that, as in old legends, she was the incarnation of a Buddha. Where there not old stories in which prostitutes and courtesans were Buddha incarnate?

  He took her loose hair lightly in his hand. He strove to quiet himself, seeking confession and repentance of his misdeeds. But it was the woman in his past, that floated into his mind. And what he remembered fondly had nothing to do wit
h the length of his affairs with them, their beauty, their grace and intelligence. It had to do with such things as the remark the Kobe woman had made: 'I slept as if I were dead. I really slept as if I were dead.' It had to do with women who had lost themselves in his caresses, who had been frantic with pleasure. Was the pleasure less a matter of the depths of their affections than of their physical endowments? What would this girl be like when she was fully grown? He extended the arm that embraced her and stroked her back. But of course he had no way of knowing. When on his previous visit he had slept with the witchlike girl, he had asked himself how much of the depth and breadth of sex he had known in his sixty seven years, and he had felt the tought as his own senility. And it was strange that the small girl tonight seemed to bring sex back from the past. He touched his lips gently to her closed lips. There were no taste. They were dry. The fact that there was no taste seemed to improve them. He might never see her again. By the time the small lips were damp with the taste of sex, Eguchi might already be dead. The thought did not sadden him. Leaving her mouth, his lips brushed against her eyebrows and eyelashes. She moved her head slightly. Her forehead came against his eyes. His eyes were closed, and he closed them tighter.

  Behind the closed eyes an endless succession of phantasms floated up and disappeared. Presently they began to take on a certain shape. A number of golden arrows flew near and passed on. At their tips were hyacinths of deep purple. At their tails were orchids of various colors. It seemed strange that at such speed the flowers did not fall. Eguchi opened his eyes. He had begun to doze off.