HOUSE OF SLEEPING BEAUTIES AND OTHER STORIES - YASUNARI KAWABATA

I’m not sure where I heard about this book. Kawabata also wrote a very famous novel about Go that I haven’t read but would like to and muscle-fascist Yukio Mishma recommends this collection highly enough to write the intro, so perhaps through one of those avenues. I heard the basic outline of the plot, there’s a “brothel” where you pay money to (literally) sleep next to young drugged girls, years ago and it’s perversity always stuck with me. Turns out that that summary misses the main thrust of the novella, which centers around aging and possession. The narrator is an old man and the titular House of Sleeping Beauties is explicitly for old men. The book is mainly composed of a series of visits to the house and all the weird, sad, obsessive thoughts the narrator has before taking pills and falling asleep himself. He occasionally talks with the madam and pushes the limit in terms of what he’s allowed to do to the girls (of course he does and of course the book has a deeply unsettling rape-y fantasy feel) but the centerpieces are the long trains of thoughts that connect the narrator’s life and loves with feelings of decline and decay and an obsession with virginity (one of the weirdest tangents to be sure). It’s reminded me of Eyes Wide Shut. I also didn’t realize that The House of Sleeping Beauties is short and the also short book has 2 more stories. The second one is about a man borrowing and conversing with a woman’s arm. The other is about a misanthrope who has a large collection of animals. All the stories are eerie and dreamy and all are about how an obsession with possessing people (and animals) twists and distorts and ruins you. 8 sleeping beauties.