[In the following review, Sibley asserts that the title story of Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties is "one of the finest works of Kawabata's late career."]

There would seem to be a special place in modern Japanese literature for works set "in the autumn of the flesh," as Tanizaki Jun'ichiro once put it, by writers past the prime of life—swan songs (often deliberately premature) steeped in waning sensuality. The title story of this collection is an excellent specimen of the type and one of the finest works of Kawabata's late career. On the recommendation of a friend, "old Eguchi" pays several visits to an establishment where young women lie drugged into oblivion, solely for the discret delectation of a senile clientele. Though proud of his continuing potency, he resists the temptation to break the strict house rules against full possession of the sleeping beauties.

In the course of the five lonely nights that Eguchi passes beside the warm yet less than wholly alive bodies, he drifts from a state of heightened awareness of all the senses in a deep sleep filled with disquieting dreams of women he has known. With the death of his companion on the last night from an overdose of drugs, the illusory air of satiation which the house has so far succeeded in creating is dispelled. All that remains is an impression of inhumanity and impotence. But, up to the final page, illusion is the stuff of which this story is made, both in substance and style. Kawabata's prose, which is translated by Edward Seidensticker with something surpassing mere faithfulness, speaks in sighs and whispers throughout.

While "Of Birds and Beasts" belongs to a much earlier period in Kawabata's career, its central figure is analogously an aging and lonely man. A detailed description of the cold, detached pleasure he has derived from a succession of pet birds and dogs is masterfully interwoven with a fragmentary, and almost equally detached, review of an affair begun some ten years ago. The third selection, "One Arm," is a brief, lyrical excursion into fetishistic fantasy. Unavoidably, it appears rather inconsequential between the two small masterpieces that make up the bulk of this volume.