SOURCE: A review of House of the Sleeping Beauties, in The Saturday Review, New York, Vol. 52, No. 24, June 14, 1969, pp. 34-5.

Fitzsimmons is an American poet, educator, and critic with a special interest in Japanese culture. In the following highly favorable assessment of 'House of the Sleeping Beauties, he perceives a theme unifying the three stories in the volume: the "lasting and lucid vision of one aspect of human fear."

Are you afraid of people? Of individuals in all their howling singularity? Do you carry somewhere deep inside you a primitive awareness that other human beings are the most baffling, complex, unpredictable phenomena you will ever have to cope with on this earth?

This is the theme of the three stories contained in 1968 Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties, in which the author explores the fear that compels a man to try to reduce other persons...