[Fitzsimmons is an American poet, educator, and critic with a special interest in Japanese culture. In the following highly favorable assessment of 'House of the Sleeping Beauties, he perceives a theme unifying the three stories in the volume: the "lasting and lucid vision of one aspect of human fear."]

Are you afraid of people? Of individuals in all their howling singularity? Do you carry somewhere deep inside you a primitive awareness that other human beings are the most baffling, complex, unpredictable phenomena you will ever have to cope with on this earth?

This is the theme of the three stories contained in 1968 Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties, in which the author explores the fear that compels a man to try to reduce other persons to things, or to replace them with less threatening creatures.

There is an astonishing honesty of vision in the title story about an old man who both needs and dreads to have other people close to him. Unlike the regular customers of the House of the Sleeping Beauties, Eguchi retains a touch of sexual potency. The house was designed to enable old men near death to pass the night with lovely young girls, so heavily drugged they would not waken no matter what was done to them. Although their virginity was considered safe, the other ways in which they might be used while asleep were not overlooked; the proprietress warns Eguchi that he must not "put his finger in the mouth of the sleeping girl, or try anything else of that sort."

Old Eguchi is the only real character in this story. The girls are mere presences, but intensely physical ones, and Eguchi dwells long on the details of their flesh, hair, nails, color and, especially, odor. Somewhat aroused by his inspections, Eguchi moves to take one of the girls in her sleep, whatever the consequences. He is, however, startled and frightened off by the actuality of her virginity.

In much of Kawabata's work virginity is a powerful and mysterious force, almost a focus of worship. In this story it emerges clearly as an aspect of his fascination with the effort to keep human relations as neat—i.e., inhuman—as possible. Virginity is "clean," an adjective Kawabata's characters apply to a landscape, a woman's genitals, or the entire quality of a human relationship.

Eguchi's experiences in the House trigger a series of memories and nightmares about his lovers, wife, daughters, and a fourteen-year-old prostitute, revealing finally how barren all these relationships were and leading to a fierce determination to reach somehow, anyhow, these sleeping girls who are only the latest manifestation of the unreachable other. But their evasion is complete—and completely ironic, since they are wholly available as flesh. The result is that old Eguchi has an ever stronger desire to hurt, even to kill one of them. Thus he is led to consider the next step in minimizing a human relationship. He asks for the same potent drug that is given to the girls. Then the step beyond that: death and the utter "neatness" of two corpses lying side by side through the night, growing cold together.

In the short "One Arm," a fantasy dating from the 1930s, a young man spends the night with the arm of a young girl, which she removes and lends to him. He passes the hours rehearsing his fears, and when he tries, as she has suggested, to replace one of his arms with hers, he is seized with panic. He tears her arm from his shoulder and flings it away, unable to unite with even this small portion of another.

In the longer and more recent "Of Birds and Beasts" the narrator is a middle-aged man who has abandoned as far as possible relations with humans, preferring animals and birds. This is some gain: fear-based actions that might earn him mockery or retaliation from people now lead only to the suffering and destruction of pets, and to some small mourning. Again Kawabata uses external events to unwind the narrator's memories—in this case, the details of a long but sterile affair with a dancer.

The focus and strategy of these three stories, though written over a span of years, is essentially the same. They reveal a lasting and lucid vision of one aspect of human fear. The honesty with which that vision is allowed to appear in the pages of this book has finally clarified for me Kawabata's preoccupations with the relationship between persons and non-persons and with metaphors clustering around virginity and "cleanness," which have puzzled me again and again as I have read him over the years. Someone, I think, chose these stories very carefully, someone deeply sensitive to Kawabata's whole life work, probably the only man sensitive enough to Kawabata's style to have come near to rendering it successfully into English—the translator, Edward G. Seidensticker.

Years ago in Japan a friend casually referred to Kawabata as the inventor of the haiku novel. In those days I shared more fully than I knew my culture's tendency to reduce mystery by carefully describing its peripheral aspects in mechanical terms. Thinking that haiku was a matter of syllable count, sound agreement, seasonal reference, etc., I was puzzled—as puzzled as you might be by the phrase "sonnet novel," if you think the technicians' formula concerning meter, rhyme scheme, number of lines, etc., says something important about sonnets. In time I came to understand that the term haiku refers to a certain quality of vision that is adequately named only by the works of art it has shaped. As an attempt at defining that quality I offer: reduction to essence, the power of suggestiveness, restraint from discursive comment, the drama inherent in seeing, freshness, boldness, simplicity.

Like the sonnet vision, which focuses on the resolution of conflict, the haiku vision can produce strong or weak experience. The strong experiences provided by any art preserve our dreams, safeguard our mysteries, offer illumination. Since prose fiction is the artistic strategy most successfully employed by the technicians who would turn every art form into just one more means of manipulating people and minimizing any possibility of illumination, the term "haiku novel" says something important about just what it is Yasunari Kawabata does with words. He does it well.