[Mishima is considered one of the most important modern Japanese writers. Both prolific and versatile, he wrote dozens of novels, dramas, short stories, essays and screenplays. His works often reflect his adherence to traditional Japanese values, a dedication which was ultimately demonstrated in his ritual suicide in 1970. In the essay below, he extols the interwoven themes and precise scenic detail in the title story of the collection House of the Sleeping Beauties.]

There would seem to be, among the works of great writers, those that might be called of the obverse or the exterior, their meaning on the surface, and those of the reverse or interior, the meaning hidden behind; or we might liken them to exoteric and esoteric Buddhism. In the case of Mr. Kawabata, Snow Country falls in the former category, while "House of the Sleeping Beauties" is most certainly an esoteric masterpiece.

In an esoteric masterpiece, a writer's most secret, deeply hidden themes make their appearance. Such a work is dominated not by openness and clarity but by a strangling tightness. In place of limpidness and purity we have density; rather than the broad, open world we have a closed room. The spirit of the author, flinging away all inhibitions, shows itself in its boldest form. I have elsewhere likened "House of the Sleeping Beauties" to a submarine in which people are trapped and the air is gradually disappearing. While in the grip of this story, the reader sweats and grows dizzy, and knows with the greatest immediacy the terror of lust urged on by the approach of death. Or, given a certain reading, the work might be likened to a film negative, A print made from it would no doubt show the whole of the daylight world in which we live, reveal the last detail of its bright, plastic hypocrisy.

"House of the Sleeping Beauties" is unusual among Mr. Kawabata's works for its formal perfection. At the end the dark girl dies, and "the woman of the house" says: "There is the other girl." With this last cruel remark, she brings down the house of lust, until then so carefully and minutely fabricated, in a collapse inhuman beyond description. It may appear to be accidental, but it is not. At a stroke it reveals the inhuman essence in a structure apparently built with solidity and care—an essence shared by "the woman of the house" with old Eguchi himself.

And that is why old Eguchi "had never been more sharply struck by a remark."

Eroticism has not, for Mr. Kawabata, pointed to totality, for eroticism as totality carries within itself humanity. Lust inevitably attaches itself to fragments, and, quite without subjectivity, the sleeping beauties themselves are fragments of human beings, urging lust to its highest intensity. And, paradoxically, a beautiful corpse, from which the last traces of spirit have gone, gives rise to the strongest feelings of life. From the reflection of these violent feelings of the one who loves, the corpse sends forth the strongest radiance of life.

At a deeper level, this theme is related to another of importance in Mr. Kawabata's writing, his worship of virgins. This is the source of his clean lyricism, but below the surface it has something in common with the themes of death and impossibility. Because a virgin ceases to be a virgin once she is assaulted, impossibility of attainment is a necessary premise for putting virginity beyond agnosticism. And does not impossibility of attainment put eroticism and death forever at that same point? And if we novelists do not belong on the side of "life" (if we are confined to an abstraction of a kind of perpetual neutrality), then the "radiance of life" can only appear in the realm where death and eroticism are together.

"House of the Sleeping Beauties" begins with old Eguchi's visit to a secret house ruled over by "a small woman in her mid-forties." Since the reason for her presence is to make that extremely important remark at the conclusion, she is drawn with ominous detail, down to the large bird on her obi and the fact that she is left-handed.

One is struck with admiration at the precision, the extraordinary fineness of detail, with which Mr. Kawabata describes the first of the "sleeping beauties" the sixtyseven-year-old Eguchi spends the night with—as if she were being caressed by words alone. Of course it hints at a certain inhuman objectivity in the visual quality of male lust.

Her right hand and wrist were at the edge of the quilt. Her left arm seemed to stretch diagonally under the quilt. Her right thumb was half hidden under her cheek. The fingers on the pillow beside her face were slightly curved in the softness of sleep, though not enough to erase the delicate hollows where they joined the hand. The warm redness was gradually richer from the palm to the fingertips. It was a smooth, glowing white hand.

Her knee was slightly forward, leaving his legs in an awkward position. It took no inspection to tell him that she was not on the defensive, that she did not have her right knee resting on her left. The right knee was pulled back, the leg stretched out.

Thus the girl who has become a "living doll" is for the old man "life that can be touched with confidence."

And what a splendidly erotic technique we have when old Kiga sees the aoki berries in the garden. "Numbers of them lay on the ground. Kiga picked one up. Toying with it, he told Eguchi of the secret house." From this passage or near it, the feeling of confinement and suffocation begins to come over the reader. The usual techniques of dialogue and character description are of no use in "House of the Sleeping Beauties," for the girls are asleep. It must be very rare for literature to give so vividly a sense of individual life through descriptions of sleeping figures.