SOURCE: "Sweet Dreams," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 3781, August 23, 1974, p. 911.

In the following review, the critic asserts that the stories in Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties are "linked … by the theme of a lonely subject and his peculiar eroticism, and by the interplay of reality and fancy within a lonely mind."

Of the three stories in this volume, [House of the Sleeping Beauties], "Of Birds and Beasts" was written in the early 1930s, while "One Arm" and the longer, "House of the Sleeping Beauties" are among Kawabata's later works. But there is a firm continuity between the stories, linked as they are by the theme of a lonely subject and his peculiar eroticism, and by the interplay of reality and fancy within a lonely mind.

"Of Birds and Beasts" is perhaps the least skilful; the transition from the reality of the middle-aged man's strange attachment to...