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House of the Sleeping Beauties
and other stories
Yasunari Kawabata
Translated by Edward Seidensticker
Paperback 160 pages
132 x 189mm 230g
ISBN : 978-4-7700-2975-1 / 4-7700-2975-6
Publish : May, 2004
Price : $16.00 |
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[ About the Book ]
Nobel prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata is noted for his combination of a traditional Japanese aesthetic with modernist, often surreal trends. In these three tales, superbly translated by Edward Seidensticker, erotic fantasy is underlaid with longing and memories of past loves.
In the title story, the protagonist visits a brothel where elderly men spend a chaste but lecherous night with a drugged, unconscious virgin. As he admires the girl's beauty, he recalls his past womanizing, and reflects on the relentless course of old age.
In One Arm, a young girl removes her right arm and gives it to the narrator to take home for the night; a surreal seduction follows as he tries to allay its fears, caresses it, and even replaces his own right arm with it.
The protagonist of Of Birds and Beasts prefers the company of his pet birds and dogs to people, yet for him all living beings are beautiful objects which, though they give him pleasure, he treats with casual cruelty.
Beautiful yet chilling, richly poetic yet subtly disturbing, these stories make compelling reading and reaffirm Kawabata's status as a world-class writer.
Reviews
"An esoteric masterpiece." —Yukio Mishima
"Extraordinarily gripping." —Irish Press
"Revealing an astonishing honesty of vision." —Saturday Review
"A poetic meditation on the twin themes of sexuality and death." —Financial Times
"One of the finest works of Kawabata's late career." —William F. Sibley
About the Authors
YASUNARI KAWABATA was born in 1899. He described himself as a child "without home or family" and became, in the novelist Mishima's words, "a perpetual traveler." He lost his parents in infancy, his grandmother and only sister died shortly afterward, and he was fourteen when his grandfather died. In 1917 he left his native Osaka to enter a school in Tokyo, and in 1927—three years after graduating from Tokyo Imperial University—he published a short novel, The Izu Dancer. Probably his best-known work, Snow Country, was completed in 1947 and has come to typify the sense of loneliness and chilly lyricism associated with the world of Kawabata. In his most fertile decade following the end of World War II he produced The Lake first serialized in 1954, along with two major novels—The Master of Go and The Sound of the Mountain. House of the Sleeping Beauties was published in the early sixties, and Kawabata was made the first Japanese Nobel laureate for literature in 1968. He died in 1972.
EDWARD SEIDENSTICKER, the translator, was born in Colorado. He attended the University of Colorado, and at the outbreak of the Pacific War was assigned to the Navy Language School, where he studied Japanese. After further work at Columbia and Harvard, he settled in Japan in 1948, and spent over ten years there, the first two as a diplomat. After a spell of teaching at Stanford, in 1966 he became Professor of Japanese at the University of Michigan, and it was during the following years in Ann Arbor that most of The Tale of Genji was translated. He is currently Professor of Japanese at Columbia University, teaching for half the year, and living the remaining half in Tokyo.
Among his other translations are a number of works by Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Kawabata Yasunari, and Mishima Yukio. In recognition of his role in the introduction of Japanese literature abroad, Professor Seidensticker was awarded the prestigious Kikuchi Kan Prize and the Order of the Rising Sun—one of the Japanese government's highest honors.
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