SOURCE: "Last Extremity: Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties, " in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. XIII, No. 1, 1970, pp. 19-30.

[In the essay below, Kimball closely scrutinizes the imagery in "House of the Sleeping Beauties, " detecting numerous pairs of opposing or contradictory images in the story.]

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Yasunari Kawabata refers to his essay, "Eyes in Their Last Extremity." The title comes from the suicide note of the famous short story writer, Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927). As his remarks show, Kawabata has pondered the question of suicide and rejects it as an unenlightened act. But the phrase which so struck him, "eyes in their last extremity," is incarnate in the person of old Eguchi, protagonist of "House of the Sleeping Beauties." In this novel, Kawabata poignantly explores the intimate thoughts of an old man searching for the meaning of his existence. In his sensual yearnings, erotic fancies, and subtle attempts at selfdeception Eguchi probes back to the source of life. But the quest is a failure; he ends a lonely old man, chilled with the knowledge of his aloneness.

The novel is at once traditional, from one called the "most Japanese" of writers, and modern—as modern as geriatrics, senior citizens, and "Sunset Villages." The traditional side is apt to puzzle Western readers, who may well wonder what sort of guide-rails one can grasp hold of when crossing this "spiritual bridge spanning between East and West," as the Nobel prize citation described the novelist. The something "Japanese" about Kawabata is a meditative, sympathetic, sometimes wistful, and highly evocative understanding of nature, or rather, of the subtle interplay between nature and human existence. It has deep roots in the heritage of Japan's past, both religious and literary, from Buddhist reflection and Shinto mystique as well as their artistic calling card, the haiku poem. Thus, in "House of the Sleeping Beauties," the wrist of one of the sleeping girls brushes over old Eguchi's eye and the scent brings "rich new fantasies." The old man's thoughts are like a poem; "just at this time of year, two or three winter peonies blooming in the warm sun, under the high stone fence of an old temple in Yamato." The flowers in turn suggest old Eguchi's daughters. This passage, and others like it, illustrate what one critic has described as the "painfully delicate nuances and almost immeasurable subtlety peculiar to Japanese art and literature" [George Saito, The Oriental Economist, October 1962].

But even for Japanese readers the Nobel prize winner's works sometimes appear strange and even uninviting. Is it because Kawabata's sad, fragmented world is also a world of resignation, of quiescent Buddhism? Is the voice of this most Japanese of Japanese authors the voice of the past? And if so, is his famous Nobel speech the swan-song of an age? Kawabata's translator, Edward Seidensticker, raised these and other questions in an address given in Tokyo in April, 1969. Commenting that Kawabata's great theme was loneliness, the impossibility of love—in short, alienation—Professor Seidensticker asked: why then is Kawabata neglected by a generation of young people that so visibly demonstrates its feeling of alienation? The answers are not easy to obtain. Nor is it entirely clear that the current generation does in fact neglect its Nobel winner. In any case, however "traditionally Japanese," however much "of the past," and however puzzling, Kawabata's artistry has much which declares its timeliness and relevance for the present.

What indeed could be more relevant—to any age—than loneliness, the hopelessness of love, alienation? From the frustrated lovers of Snow Country to the dreamily desiring man in "One Arm," Kawabata brilliantly evokes the poignancy of thwarted love. His other major themes too are universally appealing. The "darkness and wasted beauty" which "run like a ground bass through his major work," represent an integral part of the heritage of both East and West [quotation from Seidensticker's Introduction to Snow Country]. Again, old age and death too preoccupy Kawabata. He said after World War II that he could write only elegies, and in keeping with this resolve wrote such works as The Sound of the Mountain and Thousand Cranes. "House of the Sleeping Beauties" can be added. Puzzling then, he may be, in great part no doubt due to his poetic, elliptical style, but Kawabata is very much relevant, "contemporary" in the sense that universal themes are always contemporary. And his major themes are all presented in "House of the Sleeping Beauties."

Like Tanizaki's Diary of a Mad Old Man, Kawabata's works reveal the inner workings of an old man's mind, recording his efforts to make the erotic most of his last days. But Kawabata's novel has a sinister note, and the crimson velvet curtains of the sleeping beauties' room create a setting which might have come from one of the macabre works of Edgar Allan Poe. The sinister note is sustained, for death suffuses the narrative; from the opening pages where one reads that "the wind carried the sound of approaching winter" to the final lines where the dark girl's body is dragged downstairs, the reader suspects death. And death comes, as inevitably as it must soon come to old Eguchi. Kawabata's artistry manifests itself in the way he combines the suggestions of death with bits of setting, builds up suspense, and uses indirection to achieve a unified tone. The result would satisfy Poe's criterion for the ideal short story, one which has a "unique or single effect." The effect in this case is a feeling of inevitability, a gloomy sense that something is coming to an end, and that at the end death waits.

Thus Yukio Mishima [in his introduction to the volume] speaks of "House of the Sleeping Beauties" as a work dominated by "strangling tightness" and likens it to "a submarine in which people are trapped and the air is gradually disappearing." The reader, he says, "knows with the greatest immediacy the terror of lust urged on by the approach of death." Kawabata carefully cultivates this feeling of "tightness." The opening words of his story are a warning which at once suggests danger and a strange eroticism. Old Eguchi is "not to put his finger into the mouth of the sleeping girl, or try anything else of that sort." Kawabata quickly adds the sinister note. The house has a "secret," and a locked gate, and when Eguchi arrives, all is silent. The woman who admits him has a strange and "disquieting" bird design on her obi (kimono waist band). Images of death soon accumulate. The secret house is near the sea, and the sound of the waves is violent. "It was as if they were beating against a high cliff, and as if this little house were at its very edge. The wind carried the sound of approaching winter, perhaps because of something in old Eguchi." The winter season and the nearby sea, both archetypal symbols of death, suggest the mood. Eguchi, before entering the room of the sleeping girl, recalls lines from a poetess who died young: "the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned." He wonders if the sleeping girl will resemble a drowned corpse.

Small wonder that old Eguchi begins this first visit to the secret house with "apprehension" and an "unpleasant emptiness." As the reader first suspects, then gradually realizes with deepening awareness, that "emptiness" is Eguchi's own. For the old man's series of visits to the House of the Sleeping Beauties is a series of confrontations with himself, a set of experiments in self-analysis in which his identity is very much at issue. What could force one to be more intensely introspective than a meeting where the other person is only a presence, a body, and where one's musings, questions, charges are met only with silence or the slight movement of a hand? At such time any "dialogue" is self-generated, self-sustained, and ultimately self-directed. And what, for an old man, could more intensify the confrontation than to have that other person a kind of polarizing opposite, a soft, beautiful, and silent young woman? Such a meeting would heighten memories, call forth old sensations, and force a measurement of oneself in relation to their presence and the present moment. Thus Eguchi begins his quest.

Nearing seventy years of age, Eguchi is like the secret house seems to be when the waves roar, perched on the edge of the cliff above the sea. Yet still clear of mind, and still virile to some extent, he grows irritable at any suggestion that he might be senile or helpless like other old men who visit the house. "I'm all right," he growls at the woman of the house when she cautions him to be careful of the wet stones and tries to help him, "I'm not so old yet that I need to be led by the hand." But his vision is that of one in his last extremity. "An old man lives next door to death," he says in the final chapter. And what is it to be an old man, in one's last extremity? People in their thirties sometimes experience the first traumatic shudder in realization of time's fleetness. By the forties, horizons have constricted, doors have closed, the vocational crisis is reached. At fifty, the backward look begins, the crisis of identity becomes acute, depression sets in. And what of the old man, nearing the end? What hopes and pleasures remain? What self-deceptions lure him on? What does he hope to gain from the house of the sleeping beauties?

Kawabata divides his narrative rather formally, into five chapters. Unlike the familiar dramatic form, however, the final section is not a denouement; rather, the story builds to a climax which comes only in the last pages. In each of the first four chapters, Eguchi visits the secret house and spends the night, each time sleeping by the side of a different girl. In the fifth chapter, Eguchi's fifth visit, the old man finds that he has been allotted two girls. Before this last visit, Eguchi learns that one of the old men has died while staying in the secret house. For both Eguchi and the reader, this fact, together with the discovery that there are to be two girls instead of one, heightens the suspense. In the night one of the girls dies, and at the end of the novel old Eguchi, shocked, stands gazing at the remaining beauty and wonders where they have taken the body of the other.

On his first visit the apprehensive Eguchi experiences a number of sensations and finds himself probing his past. As an older person often remembers, recreates, and sometimes writes "the story of his life" to forestall death and define his existence, so Eguchi relives from earlier days. The imagined smell of baby's milk starts a series of associations. He first remembers a geisha lover's jealous anger over the baby milk she smelled on his coat. This in turn calls up the memory of a lover he had before he married. He remembers a particular meeting when her breast had become lightly stained with blood. He next recalls the middle-aged woman who counseled him to count potential lovers as a means of getting to sleep. Soon his thoughts turn again to the girl "whose breast had been wet with blood," and he remembers especially the cleanness of her secret parts and of seeing her in Kyoto in the midst of flowers and bamboo. When he takes one of the two sleeping pills provided, he dreams, first of embracing a woman with four legs, and next, that one of his daughters has borne a deformed child. The child is hacked to pieces in preparation for disposal. Horrified, Eguchi awakens to the four crimson walls. He takes the second pill and sleeps till morning. On this first visit, a number of images filter through Eguchi's mind and blend together; dreams and memories mingle, erotic fancies and nostalgic reflections produce babies, blood, women's breasts and secret parts, thoughts of sleep, and the women of Eguchi's life. On subsequent visits they reappear, sometimes in altered form.

On his second visit two weeks later, Eguchi, somewhat more nervous than before, finds an even more beautiful girl awaiting him. Aroused by caressing her and by her "witch-like" beauty, he decides to violate the rules, discovers the girl is a virgin, and, surprised, resists the temptation. The girl's warm scent brings visions of flowers, and flowers recall memories of his three daughters. He especially remembers his youngest and how, when she had lost her virginity to a suitor, he had taken her on a trip to "revive her spirits," and they had seen a famous 400-year-old camellia tree. In the camellia-like richness of the body next to him he feels "the current of life, the melody of life, the lure of life." This time Eguchi takes both sleeping tablets at once. His second visit has produced a melange of sensations akin to the first; the deep red of the girl's lipstick and the reflection of the crimson curtains on the girl's skin mingle with visions of the camellia and thoughts of virginity, women's breasts, mother, and sleep.

Eight days later, Eguchi makes his third visit to the secret house. Whereas the second girl was "experienced," the third is "still in training," the woman of the house informs him. The sight of the young girl and the two usual sleeping tablets causes Eguchi to ponder what it would be like to "sleep a sleep as of the dead." He then remembers a young married woman he had met at a night-club and taken to his hotel three years before. "I slept as if I were dead," she had told him in the morning. His pleasure in hearing this "stayed with him like youthful music." Next, the sleeping beauty's open mouth and tongue recall a young prostitute Eguchi had disliked and dismissed on carnival night. He begins to ponder the problem of evil, recalls past sexual pleasures, and finally, embracing the sleeping girl, dozes and dreams of golden arrows and flowers. He awakens and rings in vain for the woman of the house; he wants to take some of the drug and sleep that deep, death-like sleep. The old man's thoughts have drifted from erotic fancies—the rounded shoulders, open mouth, and tongue—to thoughts of pregnancy, flowers, and especially, sleep.

Before retiring on his fourth visit, Eguchi and the woman banter about death and "promiscuity," and, when he asks about "the worst one can get by with" in the house, the remarks turn to suicide and murder. When he lies beside the girl he feels that his successive visits have each brought "a new numbness" inside him. The girl's strong scent reminds him again of the milky smell of a baby. He imagines a wild bird skimming the sea's waves, "something in its mouth dripping blood." Eguchi amuses himself with erotic play around the girl's face: "Taking the lower lip at its center, he opened it slightly. Though not small in proportion to the size of her lips, her teeth were small all the same, and regularly ranged. He took away his hand. Her lips remained open. He could still see the tips of her teeth. He rubbed off some of the lipstick at his fingertips on the full earlobe, and the rest on the round neck. The scarcely visible smear of red was pleasant against the remarkably white skin." Eguchi closes his eyes, envisions a swarm of butterflies, and wonders if the bosom of the girl evoked the image. He leaves on her breasts "several marks the color of blood." In the morning he asks for, and is refused, extra sleeping medicine.

One can see in the structure of the narrative both progression and thematic unity. Eguchi's visits to the secret house follow the deepening season; autumn turns to winter and the fall rains become sleet and snow. The final visit is made in "dead winter." The suspense too deepens, as Eguchi's thoughts become increasingly serious and macabre. Part of the subtle build-up is the old man's gradually increasing desire for stronger medicine and the growing urge to join the sleeping beauties in their death-like sleep. Unity is achieved by the concentration on character—primarily old Eguchi—and on place, by the continual piling up of sensuous imagery. Eguchi is in turn aroused, soothed, stimulated, troubled, and calmed by the touch, smell, and sight of the soft flesh beside him in the red room. Again, unity is heightened by the recurrence of like or similar images; virginity, sexual experience, pregnancy, and babies vie or blend with the thoughts of flowers, parts of a woman's body, blood, and the sleep of death. like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Kawabata is especially deft in his use of color. The house of sleeping beauties is a house of whites, reds, and blacks: the whiteness of skin and milk, the redness of velvet curtains and blood, the blackness of night, death, and the dark sea.

Like Hawthorne too, Kawabata symbolically probes the human heart. Indeed the crimson-curtained room is both heart and womb. It is heart, where an old man living a death-in-life confronts his paradoxical opposite, a young woman who is life-in-death; here he relives his past loves and puzzles over his existence. Eguchi probes deeper and deeper into his consciousness or "heart" as he returns repeatedly to the secret house. And it is womb; in its warm comfort, Eguchi's thoughts turn to baby's milk, pregnancy, sex, blood, and death. It is a feminine world, where the women of Eguchi's life parade through his dreams and reveries. Maternal in its appeal, the crimson room lures him ever deeper in thought and farther back in time, inevitably, to the first woman of his life, his mother, in whom the notions of babies and breasts, his hopes, fears, and anxieties, the sensations of blood and death have their source.

On a cold night in the dead of winter Eguchi makes his fifth visit to the secret house. An old man has died while sleeping beside one of the beauties, and references to that death dominate Eguchi's conversation with the woman of the house. Eguchi is startled to learn that this time there are two girls. In another Hawthorne-like touch, Kawabata makes one dark, the other fair. Eguchi turns to the dark girl first. Her lips remind him of a girl he had kissed forty years before, who had insistently denied having lipstick, despite the evidence produced by Eguchi's handkerchief. He next turns to the light girl and then, sandwiched between the two, takes one of the sleeping pills. As drowsiness overcomes him, his thoughts turn to the first woman of his life; "Now at sixty-seven, as he lay between two naked girls a new truth came from deep inside him. Was it blasphemy, was it yearning? He opened his eyes and blinked, as if to drive away a nightmare. But the drug was working. He had a dull headache. Drowsily, he pursued the image of his mother; and then he sighed, and took two breasts, one of each of the girls, in the palms of his hands. A smooth one and an oily one. He closed his eyes." His mother had died when Eguchi was only seventeen. He recalls the grief and terror of that scene. " 'Yoshio. Yoshio.' His mother called out in little gasps. Eguchi understood, and stroked her tormented bosom. As he did so she vomited a large quantity of blood. It came bubbling from her nose. She stopped breathing. . . . 'Ah!' The curtains that walled the secret room seemed the color of blood. He closed his eyes tight, but that red would not disappear."

Thus Eguchi, an old man standing on the brink of senility/death, yearns to return to the source from which he first gained reason and life. In his "last extremity" he lies symbolically cradled with the protective covering of the two girls, and, clinging to their breasts, journeys in thought to a time of security and warmth. In the blood-red room the dark and light girls, their feet intertwined ("One of her feet was between the feet of the fair-skinned girl") encircle the old man like the yin and yang of totality, and he longs with incestuous longing to penetrate again that comforting oneness, that matrix which is a mixture of life, hope, escape, and death. But his memory of mother is primarily a memory of suffering and death; the breasts that haunt his memory are withered, and no fresh milk will come from them. And so Eguchi dreams a succession of nightmares, erotic dreams of his honeymoon, of coming home to mother, and of blood-red flowers. He awakens to find the magic circle broken: the dark girl, of whom he had first murmured, "life itself," is dead. Eguchi emerges from the warm, dreamy, illusory sleep to feel the cold press upon him for the first time. It is as if part of himself has died. He hears the callous remarks of the woman telling him, "Go back to sleep. There is the other girl," and as the car takes the dark girl's body away, Eguchi stands shivering with extra sleeping medicine in his hand, gazing at the remaining fair beauty.

The reader who has come to identify with Eguchi will share something of the chilled numbness which characterizes the old man in the final scene. One has a sense of near paralysis, of having been reduced by events to a state of catatonic immobility. Perhaps it is this which prompts Mishima's submarine analogy. The suffocating or numbing effect again illustrates narrative skill. He achieves it by filling his short work with countless examples of paradoxical or contradictory thoughts and appearance/reality opposites. They emerge, sometimes several to a page, throughout the novel. The result is tension, and for the reader, the feeling that he is pulled in different directions, none of them clear, or, as in Mishima's analogy, the feeling that he is trapped, immobilized by the certainty that death is inevitably approaching but that he can only remain fixed and gasp for air.

The contraries are apparent first in the nature of the story itself. Ugly old men sleep beside beautiful young girls; the young girls are alive, yet death-like in sleep. They are real persons, but the situation is artificial. The opposites of life/death, old-age/youth, ugliness/beauty, and reality/illusion continue throughout. Eguchi's thoughts expand these themes. On his first visit he recalls that he has passed ugly nights with women. "The ugliness had to do not with the appearance of the women but with their tragedies, their warped lives." But he wonders if there is anything "uglier" than an old man lying beside a drugged girl. The woman's repeated admonitions about "rules" add further tension. Impotent old men might wish to, but cannot violate the restrictions on behavior except in limited ways. Eguchi, however, can, but is caught between his own sense of integrity and the hopelessness of the situation even if he should "break the rules." Feeling the paradoxical strangeness of his visit, Eguchi complains inwardly that "not the smallest part of his existence" reaches the girl.

The tension of opposites increases on subsequent visits. Eguchi thinks he will not return to the secret house, but does. He feels guilty about his first visit, but acknowledges that "he had not in all his sixty-seven years spent another night so clean." Eguchi expects the same girl, but gets another, one whom the woman describes ironically as "more experienced." To his protestations about "promiscuity," the woman mockingly refers to gentlemen she can "trust"—but then adds laughingly, "And what's wrong with being promiscuous." Eguchi has thought that sleeping girls represent "ageless freedom" for old men; he now wonders if the secret house conceals the "longing of sad old men for the unfinished dream, the regret for days lost without ever being had." When the girl talks in her sleep, Eguchi has a conversation which is not a conversation; he wonders if the guilt he feels is painful or if the secret feelings actually add to his pleasure. The ambiguity of his second visit is summed up as he muses upon how the girl can be "experienced"; his oxymoronic conclusion is that she is a "virgin prostitute."

On his third visit Eguchi hears that the girl, though sleeping, is somehow supposed to be "in training." The sight of the young girl's body saddens him and evokes a death wish; he longs for "a sleep like death," but hovers between this desire and the desire to stay awake for enjoyment. Aroused by the presence of the girl, he contemplates an "evil" deed, then stops to consider what evil might really be, and what evil he might have done in his life. The girl, he imagines, might even be a kind of Buddha. His thoughts thus lead ironically to another contradiction: she is temptation to evil, yet her "young skin and scent might be forgiveness" for sad old men. The contradictions continue through Eguchi's last visit which begins with steaming tea to counteract the freezing cold. But now death dominates the atmosphere and the crimson curtains seem like blood. What has begun as a curious search for new pleasure and vitality has ended in death; the girl Eguchi calls "life" is dragged lifeless down the stairs of the secret house.

Thus Eguchi learns—for even an old man must learn—the brittleness of his existence, the subtlety of self-deceit. The young flesh beside him is real enough: real to the hand, the nose, the eye, the ear, the mouth; it is the illusion of youth that deceives. The thin-lipped woman of the house, like some ancient hag-guardian of the hell of self-delusion, mocks those who enter her domain. Her callous remarks and actions, like the artificial light which must remain on throughout Eguchi's nights in the crimson room, reveal the cold secrets of the house of the sleeping beauties. For Eguchi, the safe warmth of the womb is no escape; the only "escape" is death itself. The comfortable oneness of things has been broken. In his last extremity he stands, a chilly old man asking questions of himself.