House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories

A collection of late stories led by the novella of the title. In it, an elderly man visits a secret house where men of his age may spend the night beside young women who are deeply and unwakably asleep. As he returns, his thoughts drift through memory, desire and the nearness of death. The companion stories in the volume share this quiet, strange and unsettling tone. They show Kawabata in his later years, probing loneliness, ageing and the uneasy borders of the senses.