Reading House of the Sleeping Beauties

I was reading Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties in bed. An old man visits a secret brothel that specializes in girls who are heavily drugged so old men who have lost their virility, but not their lust or longing for young minxes, can fondle them freely as they sleep.

Beside me, he said he was tired; his lower back hurt.

Repeatedly the old man flirts with the idea of violating the house rules by forcing himself on one of the unknowing virgins, naked and milky beneath the blanket in that room swathed in crimson velvet.

He even imagines strangling one, and wonders if that act of violence would be enough to wake her.

I ran my hand down his front and pressed my breasts against his back. He rolled on top of me and spread my legs.

On the old man’s second visit the proprietress says the girl he will have that evening is more experienced than the others. The old man speculates that perhaps the girl had long ago stopped thinking of the men who lay beside her, and leave their impressions on the sheets in the morning.

Kawabata writes, Any kind of inhumanity, given practice, becomes human. All the varieties of transgression are buried in the darkness of the world.

In the end, the most the old man does is place his finger in the half-opened mouth of a slumbering girl. He wipes the paint from her lips on the strands of her hair, and docilely swallows the two white pills the proprietress offers each night to sink him into his own oblivion.

I thought you said you were tired.

I was. Then why did you touch me?

Because you said you were tired.

What are you, one of those sleep fuckers?