House of the Sleeping Beauties

by Yasunari Kawabata

  Our sleep was probably light, but I had never before known sleep so warm, so sweet. A restless sleeper, I had never before been blessed with the sleep of a child.

  The long, narrow, delicate nail scratched gently at the palm of my hand, and the slight touch made my sleep deeper. I disappeared.

  I awoke screaming. I almost fell out of bed, and staggered three or four steps.

  I had awakened to the touch of something repulsive. It was my right arm.

  Steadying myself, I looked down at the arm on the bed. I caught my breath, my heart raced, my whole body trembled. I saw the arm in one instant, and the next I had torn the girl’s from my shoulder and put back my own. The act was like murder upon a sudden, diabolic impulse.

  I knelt by the bed, my chest against it, and rubbed at my insane heart with my restored hand. As the beating slowed down a sadness welled up from deeper than the deepest inside me.

  “Where is her arm?” I raised my head.

  It lay at the foot of the bed, flung palm up into the heap of the blanket. The outstretched fingers did not move. The arm was faintly white in the dim light.

  Crying out in alarm I swept it up and held it tight to my chest. I embraced it as one would a small child from whom life was going. I brought the fingers to my lips. If the dew of woman would but come from between the long nails and the fingertips!

  Of Birds and Beasts

  A chirping of birds broke in upon his daydream.

  On a dilapidated old truck was a cage that might have been for a criminal on the kabuki stage, though it was two or three times larger.

  The man’s taxi seemed to have made its way into a funeral procession. The number “23” was pasted on the windshield of the car following, beside the driver’s face. The man looked out. They were passing a Zen temple, the stone before which bore the inscription: “Historical Landmark: The Grave of Dazai Shundai.”*1 On the gate was pasted a notice that there was to be a funeral.

  They were going down a slope. At the foot of it was an intersection with a policeman directing traffic. Some thirty cars were lined up before it, threatening a jam. He gazed at the cage of birds to be released at the funeral. He was growing impatient.

  “What time is it?” he asked the maid, a small girl sitting deferentially beside him, a basket of flowers carefully upright in her lap. It was not to be expected that she would have a watch.

  “A quarter to seven,” the driver answered in her place. “This clock is six or seven minutes slow.”

  The sunset was still bright in the summer sky. The scent of the roses in the basket was strong. An oppressive scent came from some June blossom in the temple garden.

  “We’ll be late. Can’t you hurry?”

  “There’s nothing I can do till they’ve passed in the other lane. What’s happening at Hibiya Hall?” The driver was probably thinking of a return fare.

  “A dance recital.”

  “Oh? How long do you suppose it will take to let all those birds go?”

  “I imagine it’s bad luck to meet a funeral along the way.”

  There was a loud fluttering of wings. The truck was moving.

  “No, it’s good luck. They say it’s the best luck in the world.” As if to give his words emphasis, the driver slipped into the right lane and briskly passed the procession.

  “That’s strange,” laughed the man. “You’d think the opposite.” Yet it was to be expected that people should be in the habit of so thinking.

  It was strange to be concerned about such things on his way to Chikako’s recital. If he wanted to look for bad omens, the fact that they had left two corpses unburied at home should be worse luck than meeting a funeral.

  “Get rid of those birds when we get back tonight,” he said, almost spitting out the words. “They will still be in the closet upstairs.”

  It was already a week since the pair of golden-crowned kinglets had died. He had not taken the trouble to dispose of the bodies, but had left them, still in the cage, in the closet at the head of the stairs. They were so used to the corpses of small birds, he and the maid, that they still had not bothered to throw these away, even though they took cushions from under the cage whenever someone came calling.

  Along with certain varieties of titmouse and wren and chat, the golden-crowned kinglet is the smallest of caged birds. Olive above and a pale yellow-brown below, it has a brownish neck and two white stripes at the wings. The tips of the pinion feathers are yellow. At the crown of the head is a thick ring of black enclosing a ring of yellow. When the feathers are ruffled the yellow stands out like a single chrysanthemum. In the male it shades off to a deep orange. The round eyes have a certain puckish charm, and there is exuberance in the way the bird has of crawling around the top of its cage. All in all, a most winning and elegant bird.

  Since the dealer had brought them at night, the man immediately put the cage away in the dusky recesses of the house altar. Glancing at it somewhat later, he saw that the birds were very beautiful in sleep. Each had its head in the other’s feathers, and the two were like a ball of yarn, so close that it was impossible to distinguish one from the other.

  Nearing forty, he felt a youthful warmth flow over him, and stood on the table gazing on and on at the altar.

  Would there not, he wondered, in some country somewhere, be a pair of young people, in love for the first time, sleeping even thus? He wanted to share the sight, but he did not call the maid.

  From the next day, he had the kinglets on the table, to look at as he ate. Even when he had a guest, he had birds and animals with him. Not really listening to what the guest was saying, he would put a bit of feed on his finger and be intent upon training a robin chick; or, a shiba dog on his knee, he would be assiduously squashing fleas.

  “I like shibas. They have something of the fatalist in them. You have one on your knee like this, or you put him off in a corner, and he’ll stay there without moving for half a day.”

  And often he would not look at the guest until he got up to leave.

  In the summer he kept carp and scarlet minnows in a glass bowl on the parlor table.

  “Maybe it’s because I’m getting old. I don’t like seeing men any more. I don’t like men. I get tired the first minute. It has to be a woman, when you’re eating, when you’re traveling.”

  “You ought to get married.”

  “That wouldn’t do either. I like mean women. The best way is to know she’s a mean one, and go on seeing her as if you hadn’t noticed. That’s the kind I like for a maid, too.”

  “And that’s why you keep animals?”

  “It’s different with animals. I have to have something living and moving beside me.” Speaking half to himself, he would forget about the guest as he gazed at the carp of various colors and saw how the light on their scales changed as they moved about, and meditated upon the subtle world of light in this narrow expanse of water.

  When the dealer had a new bird, he would bring it around unsolicited. The man sometimes had thirty varieties in his study.

  “Not another bird!” the maid would complain.

  “You should be glad. It’s not much of a price to pay to keep me happy for four or five days.”

  “But you have that solemn expression on your face and you stare at them so.”

  “It makes you uncomfortable? You think I’m losing my mind? The place is too quiet?”

  But for him life was filled with a young freshness for several days after a new bird came. He felt in it the blessings of the universe. Perhaps it was a failing on his part, but he was unable to feel anything of the sort in a human being. And it was easier to see the wonders of creation in a moving bird than in motionless shells and flowers. The little creatures, even when caged, gave forth the joy of life.

  It was particularly so with the lively pair of kinglets.

  About a month after their arrival, one of the birds flew out as he was feeding them. The maid was flustered, and the bird flew to a camphor tree above the shed. A morning frost
was on the leaves of the camphor. The two birds, one in the cage and one outside, called to each other in high, tense voices. He put the cage on the roof of the shed, and birdlime on a stick beside it. The birds called with increasing desperation, but the escaped bird apparently flew off about noon. The pair had come from the mountains behind Nikkō.

  The bird left behind was a female. Remembering the pair asleep, he importuned his dealer for a male. He went the rounds of dealers, but with no luck. Finally his dealer got him another pair from the country. He said he wanted only the male.

  “They came as a pair. And there would be no point in keeping a single one. I’ll let you have the female for nothing.”

  “But will the three of them get along?”

  “Probably. Put the cages together for four or five days and they’ll get used to each other.”

  But, like a child with a new toy, he could not wait. As soon as the dealer had left he put the two new birds in with the old one. The commotion was worse than he had expected. The two new birds, refusing the perch, slapped from side to side of the cage. The old bird stood motionless on the floor, looking up in terror at the new ones. The new ones called to each other, a married pair to whom disaster had come. The throbbing oí the three frightened breasts was violent. He put the cage in the closet. The pair came together, calling out to each other, and the single bird kept timidly to itself.

  This would not do. He separated them, but then was overcome with pity for the lone female. He put it in with the new male. The male called out to the mate it was separated from, and did not take to the other; but in the course of time they were sleeping close together. When he put the three together the next evening the commotion was not as the day before. The three of them slept in one ball, two heads from either side in the feathers of the third. He went to sleep with the cage at his pillow.

  But when he awoke the next morning two were sleeping like a warm ball of yarn. The third lay dead under the perch, its wings half outstretched, its legs taut, its eyes half open. As if it would not do to have the others see the corpse, he took it out and, without telling the maid, threw it in the garbage box. A horrible kind of murder, he thought.

  Which had died, he wondered, gazing at the cage. Contrary to what he would have expected, the survivor seemed to be the old female. His affection was greater for the old one. Perhaps favoritism made him think the old one the survivor. He lived without a family, and the favoritism upset him.

  “If you are going to make such distinctions, why live with birds and animals? There is a very good object for them known as a human being.”

  Golden-crowned kinglets are held to be weak, quick to die; but his pair was very healthy.

  He bought a baby shrike taken by a poacher, and it was the beginning: the season was at hand when he would not be able to go out for having to feed new chicks down from the mountains. Wistaria petals fell on the water when he took the tub out to the veranda to give the birds their baths.

  As he was listening to the flapping of wings against the water and cleaning out the cages, he heard children’s voices beyond the fence. They seemed to be awaiting the death of some small animal. He pulled himself to the top of the fence, thinking that one of his wirehair puppies might have strayed from the garden. It was a skylark chick. Not yet able to stand up, it was floundering about in the garbage heap. The idea came to him that he might take it in.

  “What’s happened?”

  “The house over there.” A primary-school boy pointed toward a green house with poisonous-looking paulownias in front of it. “They threw it away. It’ll die, won’t it.”

  “Yes, it will die,” he said coldly, leaving the fence.

  The family in the green house kept three or four skylarks. They had probably discarded one that would not be a singer. The impulse toward mercy quickly left him: there was no point in taking in a bird that had been discarded as so much garbage.

  There are birds among the very young of which it is impossible to distinguish male from female. Dealers bring whole nests down from the mountains, and throw away the females as soon as they can recognize them. The female does not sing and will not sell. Love of birds and animals comes to be a quest for superior ones, and so cruelty takes root. It was his nature to want any pet animal as soon as he saw it, but he knew from experience that such easy affection was in fact a lack of affection, and that it brought slackening in the rhythm of his life. And so, however fine an animal it might be, however earnestly he might be asked to take it, he would refuse if it had been raised by someone else.

  All alone, he came to his arbitrary conclusion: he did not like people. Husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters: the bonds were not easily cut even with the most unsatisfactory of people. One had to be resigned to living with them. And everyone possessed what is called an ego.

  There was, on the other hand, a certain sad purity in making playthings of the lives and the habits of animals, and, deciding upon an ideal form, breeding toward it in a manner artificial and distorted: there was in it a godlike newness. Smiling a sardonic smile, he excused them as symbols of the tragedy of the universe and of man, these animal lovers who tormented animals, ever striving toward a purer and purer breed.

  One evening the preceding November a kennel keeper who looked like a shriveled orange because of a kidney ailment or something of the sort, came to see him.

  “A terrible thing. I let her off the leash when we got to the park, and I lost her in the fog for no more than a minute, and some cur was on her. I pulled her away and kicked her and kicked her until she couldn’t stand up. I don’t see how it could take—but it has a way of taking just when you don’t want it to.”

  “And you’re supposed to be a professional.”

  “Yes, I can’t tell anyone, that’s how embarrassing it is. Damned bitch—in just a few seconds she lost me four or five hundred yen.”*2 His yellow lips were twitching.

  The proud Doberman was slinking along with its head down. It looked timorously up at the kidney patient. The fog came pouring in.

  The dog was to be sold through the man’s good offices. It would be to his discredit, he insisted, if, once sold, it were to have a mongrel litter; but some time later, evidently pressed for money, the kennel man sold the dog without letting him know. Some two or three days afterwards the buyer came to him with the dog. The day after the purchase it had had a stillborn litter.

  “The maid heard it whining and opened the shutter, and it was in under the veranda eating a puppy. She was surprised and a little afraid and couldn’t see very well in the dark. We don’t know how many there were, but she thought it was the last one that was being eaten. We called the veterinary right away, and he said that no kennel should sell a pregnant dog. Some mongrel must have gotten at her and the kennel man had kicked and beaten the life out of her. It was not a normal birth, he said, and maybe she had gotten into the habit of eating her puppies. I ought to take her back. We’re all furious. A terrible thing to do to an animal.”

  “Let me see,” he said nonchalantly, lifting the dog and feeling its nipples. “She’s raised puppies before. She started eating them because they were dead.” He spoke with indifference, though he too was angry and sorry.

  There had been mongrels born at his house.

  Even on a trip he could not share a room with a man, and he disliked having men stay overnight in his house and did not keep a houseboy; and, though the fact had nothing to do with the way men affected him, he kept only bitches. Unless a male dog was really superior, it could not pass as a stud. Such a dog was expensive, and had to be advertised like a movie actor, and fluctuations in its career were violent. One got caught up in competing import trades, it was like gambling. He had once gone to a kennel and been shown a Japanese terrier famous as a stud. It lay all day on a quilt upstairs, and apparently assumed that when it was brought down a female had come. It was like a well-trained prostitute. Because the hair was short, the unusually well-developed organ was the more co
nspicuous. Even he turned away in discomfort.

  But it was not because of distaste for such matters that he did not keep males. His greatest delight was in delivering and rearing puppies.

  It was an unusual Boston terrier. It would dig its way under the fence, or gnaw its way through the bamboo. He had tied it up when it was in heat, but it had eaten through the cord and run out, and the puppies would be mongrels. When the maid woke him he got out of bed with the professional mien of a doctor.

  “Bring scissors and cotton. And cut up the straw.” It was the straw around the saké keg.

  The garden had a gentle newness where it was bathed in the sun of early winter. The dog lay in the sun, a bag like an egg-plant beginning to come from its belly. It made the merest gesture of wagging its tail, and looked pleadingly up at him; and suddenly he felt something like a twinge of compunction.

  This had been its first heat, and it was not yet fully grown. The look in its eyes was of having no sense of what birth meant.

  “What is happening to me? I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like it. What am I to do?” The dog seemed shy and embarrassed, but at the same time naive, and willing to leave everything to him, as if taking no responsibility for what it was doing.

  He remembered the Chikako of ten years before. Her face when she had sold herself to him had been like the dog’s.

  “Is it true that you lose feeling when you’re in this business?”

  “Well it does happen, but if you find a man you like—and you can’t exactly call it business when you have two or three regular men.”