[In the following review, the critic asserts that the stories in Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties are "linked … by the theme of a lonely subject and his peculiar eroticism, and by the interplay of reality and fancy within a lonely mind."]

Of the three stories in this volume, [House of the Sleeping Beauties], "Of Birds and Beasts" was written in the early 1930s, while "One Arm" and the longer, "House of the Sleeping Beauties" are among Kawabata's later works. But there is a firm continuity between the stories, linked as they are by the theme of a lonely subject and his peculiar eroticism, and by the interplay of reality and fancy within a lonely mind.

"Of Birds and Beasts" is perhaps the least skilful; the transition from the reality of the middle-aged man's strange attachment to his bird and animal pets to the memories of an affair with a dancer is without the facility of the later writing. "One Arm" is a bizarre dialogue between a man and a young girl's right arm which has been left with him for the night and is eventually exchanged for his own. Here Kawabata exploits his lyricism and its capacity to explore private and deeply hidden moods with exquisite minuteness.

There is the same strangling tightness which Mishima (Kawabata's protégé) senses in "House of the Sleeping Beauties" and there is in both pieces a tactful use of the traditional poetic technique of an allusive hint at the season of the year: "the pressing dampness invaded my ears to give a wet sound like the wriggling of myriads of distant earthworms".

"House of the Sleeping Beauties" describes the visits of an old man to a strange establishment where the girls, always drugged in sleep before the clients' arrival, evoke memories of earlier affairs. Deprived of the use of dialogue or character description, Kawabata manages to evoke a vivid sense of individual life by his accounts of the sleeping girls. With each of the unconscious figures, Eguchi, the old man, wants to see the eyes, to hear the voice, to talk. One of them overflows "with a sensuousness that made it possible for her body to converse in silence". The transitions are smoothly effected, on the same intuitive and emotional level and often with the same techniques of sound, scent and colour "echo" that enabled three poets to link verses in the traditional poetry. Mishima rates this story as a masterpiece of Kawabata's esoteric style. It recalls some aspects of the spirit of the erotic and the grotesque of the Japan of half a century ago.