An Analysis of Yasunari Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories --- Centering on Beauty and Ugliness, Life and Death

Abstract

Yasunari Kawabata's novel House of the sleeping beauties and other stories tells the story of an old man named Eguchi who was introduced to a hotel called House of the sleeping beauties for nights. This hotel caters for the elderly. Every old man is provided a sleeping girl who is taken with a special medicine and cannot wake up. The old man Eguchi met six sleeping beauties here. As such a special setting, the encounter between the old and young women forms two kinds of contrast beauty and ugliness, young and old. What does the author want to express through this novel? In order to solve this problem, this paper will try to discuss it by citing the original text. Generally, this paper is divided into eight parts, including the roles’ analyses, the characteristics and meanings of the beauty of sleeping beauties, the attitude of the elderly towards the beauty of sleeping beauties, the functions of sleeping beauties, and so on. Through these analyses, the two contrasts reflected in this novel, beauty and ugliness, life and death will be discussed. We will see the oppositions and connections between them in this novel. Analyses of the Characters in House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories Before analyzing the content of this novel, it is necessary to give a brief introduction to the characters in this novel. In this novel, there are three main characters – the woman, Eguchi and sleeping beauties. The story happened in a hotel-style brothel, which has two floors and can only accommodate a few guests and sleeping beauties. What are the roles of the woman, Eguchi and beauties in this novel? There are several descriptions about the appearance of the woman, the owner of this hotel, “Her dark eyes not only had an air of relaxation of vigilance, but also an accustomed calmness, which makes people lose their guard against her” “The pattern on the back of her belt was a very big strange bird. No one knows what bird it is. Why put realistic eyes and claws on such a decorated bird?”[1] ,“accustomed calmness” shows that the woman has been doing this job for a long time. The pattern of her belt seems to imply that she is a decorated person, what she really cares about is the customers' money, just like the "eyes and claws" of the strange bird. The novel’s author seems to want to use these descriptions to describe what kind of role the woman is. In addition, some dialogues in this novel can also show that the woman is a cold, ruthless person. In the last part of this novel, the last girl who was sleeping with Eguchi died, while the woman was still calm, she said “Please don't make too much publicity. We will never give you any trouble... nor will we give your name to others... Please don't worry about it and have a good rest. There's another girl” [2], even if the girl died, the woman was still very calm. These words hurt the heart of Eguchi. As for these beauties who sleep with old men, according to the descriptions in this novel, these beauties are more like objects than living lives. “When the old man got into bed, the girl did not seem to respond, such as shrugging her chest or pulling her waist. For a young woman, even if she is sleeping soundly, there will always be such a sensitive conditioned reflex, but it seems that she is sleeping extraordinarily well” [3]. The roles of these beauties have several aspects. On the one hand, they are beautiful. Some beauties call their mothers in their dreams. The sadness revealed by these cries permeates into the heart of Eguchi, “The sadness contained in the girl's voice calling for her mother penetrated into the heart of Eguchi”[4].They are also protected from entertaining guests like prostitutes, and the old people who come to this hotel can not violate these beauties. On the other International Conference on Advanced Education, Management and Humanities (AEMH 2019) Copyright © 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 352