SOURCE: "Last Extremity: Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties, " in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. XIII, No. 1, 1970, pp. 19-30.

In the essay below, Kimball closely scrutinizes the imagery in "House of the Sleeping Beauties, " detecting numerous pairs of opposing or contradictory images in the story.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Yasunari Kawabata refers to his essay, "Eyes in Their Last Extremity." The title comes from the suicide note of the famous short story writer, Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927). As his remarks show, Kawabata has pondered the question of suicide and rejects it as an unenlightened act. But the phrase which so struck him, "eyes in their last extremity," is incarnate in the person of old Eguchi, protagonist of "House of the Sleeping Beauties." In this novel, Kawabata poignantly explores the intimate thoughts of an old man searching for the meaning of his existence. In his sensual yearnings...