House of the Sleeping Beauties & Other Stories by Yasunari Kawabata (tran. by Edward Seidensticker).
Title: House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories.
Author: Yasunari Kawabata (translated by Edward Seidensticker).
Genre: Literature, fiction, short stories, sexuality, old age, philosophical fiction.
Country: Japan.
Language: Japanese.
Publication Date: 1933, 1961, and 1964.
Summary: Collects 1 novella and 2 short stories. House of the Sleeping Beauties (1961) is a novella of an establishment where old men pay to sleep beside naked, drugged out young girls-sleeping beauties-and are expected to take sleeping pills and not attempt anything of "bad taste," and one of its accidental philosophizing regulars, Eguchi. In One Arm (1964), a young woman removes her right arm and gives it to a man for the night, as the story follows his thoughts on isolation and loneliness, and actions, as he ultimately decides to replace his own arm with it. Of Birds and Beasts (1933) turns to the question whether possession is harmful to the possessed as a misanthrope tries to appreciate life by appreciating and taking care of birds, but accidentally causes them harm in the process.
My rating: 8/10.
My review:
♥ I have elsewhere likened "House of the Sleeping Beauties" to a submarine in which people are trapped and the air is gradually disappearing. While in the grip of this story, the reader sweats and grows dizzy, and knows with the greatest immediacy the terror of lust urged on by the approach of death. Or, given a certain reading, the work might be likened to a film negative. A print made from it would no doubt show the whole of the daylight world in which we live, reveal the last detail of its bright, plastic hypocrisy.
♥ One is struck with admiration at the precision, the extraordinary fineness of detail, with which Mr. Kawabata describes the first of the "sleeping beauties" the sixty-seven-year-old Eguchi spends the night with-as if she were being caressed by words alone. Of course it hints at a certain inhuman objectivity in the visual quality of male lust.
♥ It must be very rare for literature to give so vividly a sense of individual life through descriptions of sleeping figures.
~~from Introduction by Yukio Mishima.
♥ The woman got up and unlocked the door to the next room. She used her left hand. There was nothing remarkable about the act, but Eguchi held his breath as he watched her. She looked into the other room. She was no doubt used to looking through doorways, and there was nothing unusual about the back turned toward Eguchi. Yet it seemed strange. There was a large, strange bird on the knot of her obi. He did not know what species it might be. Why should such realistic eyes and feet have been put on a stylized bird? It was not that the bird was disquieting in itself, only that the design was bad; but if disquiet was to be tied to the woman's back, it was there in the bird.
♥ He was a light sleeper, given to bad dreams. A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, "the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned." It was a line Eguchi could not forget. Remembering it now, he wondered whether the girl asleep-no, put to sleep-in the next room might be like a corpse from a drowning; and he felt some hesitation about going in to her. He had not heard how the girl had been put to sleep.
♥ In his sixty-seven years, old Eguchi had passed ugly nights with women. Indeed the ugly nights were the hardest ones to forget. The ugliness had had to do not with the appearance of the women but with their tragedies, their warped lives. He did not want to add another such episode, at his age, to the record. So ran his thoughts, on the edge of the adventure. But could there be anything uglier than an old man lying the night through beside a girl put to sleep, unwaking? Had he not come to this house seeking the ultimate in the ugliness of old age?
The woman had spoken of guests she could trust. It seemed that everyone who came here could be trusted. The man who had told Eguchi of the house was so old that he was no longer a man. He seemed to think that Eguchi had reached the same stage of senility. Probably because the woman of the house was accustomed only to making arrangements for such old men, she had turned upon Eguchi a look neither of pity nor of inquiry. Still able to enjoy himself, he was not yet a guest to be trusted; but it was possible to make himself one, because of his feelings at that moment, because of the place, because of his companion. The ugliness of old age pressed down upon him. For him too, he thought, the dreary circumstances of the other guests were not far off. The fact that he was here surely indicated as much. And so he had no intention of breaking the ugly restrictions, the sad restrictions imposed upon the old men. He did not intend to break them, and he would not.
♥ The girl was approaching twenty. Even if the expression babyish was not wholly inappropriate, she should no longer have the milky scent of a baby. In fact it was a womanish scent. And yet it was very certain that old Eguchi had this very moment smelled a nursing baby. A passing specter? However much he might ask why it had come to him, he did not know the answer; but probably it had come through the opening left by a sudden emptiness in his heart. He felt a surge of loneliness, it was the bleakness of old age, as if frozen to him. And it changed to pity and tenderness for the girl who sent out the smell of young warmth. Possibly only for purposes of turning away a cold sense of guilt, the old man seemed to feel music in the girl's body. It was a music of love. As if he wanted to flee, he looked at the four walls, so covered with velvet that there might have been no exit. The crimson velvet, taking its light from the ceiling, was soft and utterly motionless. It shut in a girl who had been put to sleep, and an old man.
♥ Was it as if a girl sound asleep, saying nothing, hearing nothing, said everything to and heard everything from an old man who, for a woman, was no longer a man?
♥ The scent of the girl's breath was stronger from her mouth than it had been from her nose. It was not, however, the smell of milk. He asked himself again why the smell of milk had come to him. It was a smell, perhaps, to make him feel woman in the girl.
Old Eguchi even now had a grandchild that smelled of milk. He could see it here before him. Each of his three daughters was married and had children; and he had not forgotten how it had been when they smelled of milk, and how he had held the daughters themselves as nursing babes. Had the milky smell of these blood relatives come back as if to reprove him? No, it would be the smell of Eguchi's own heart, going out to the girl. Eguchi too turned face up, and, lying so that he nowhere touched the girl, closed his eyes. He would do well to take the sleeping medicine at his pillow. It would not be as strong as the drug the girl had been given. He would be awake earlier than she. Otherwise the secret and the fascination of the place would be gone.
♥ So far away beyond the years, why had the two memories come back to him? It did not seem likely that because he had had in him the two memories he had smelled milk in the girl beside him. They were far beyond the years, but he did not think, somehow, that one distinguished near memories from distant memories as they were new or old. He might have a fresher and more immediate memory from his boyhood sixty years ago than from only yesterday. Was that tendency not clearer the older one got? Could not a person's young days make him what he was, lead him through life? It was a triviality, but the girl whose breast had been wet with blood had taught him that a man's lips could draw blood from almost any part of a woman's body; and, although afterwards Eguchi had avoided going to that extreme, the memory, the gift from a woman bringing strength to a man's whole life, was still with him, a full sixty-seven years old.
A still more trivial thing.
♥ Eguchi was filled with a warm repose that had loneliness in it.
♥ He closed his eyes. This strange night was, as all other nights, one from which he would wake up alive in the morning.
♥ When they met by the pond, all Eguchi could think of was to ask whether she was happy.
"Yes," she replied immediately. "I am happy." Probably there was no other answer.
♥ Eguchi made no special attempt to look at the baby's face, but he looked on and on after the girl. She glanced back when she had gone some distance. Seeing that he was still watching her, she quickened her pace. He did not see her again. More than ten years ago he had heard of her death. Eguchi, now sixty-seven, had lost many friends and relations, but the memory of the girl was still young. Reduced now to three details, the baby's white cap and the cleanness of the secret place and the blood on the breast, it was still clear and fresh. Probably there was no one in the world besides Eguchi who knew of that incomparable cleanness, and with his death, not far away now, it would quite disappear from the world. Though shyly, she had let him look on as he would. Perhaps that was the way with girls; but there could be no doubt that the girl did not herself know of the cleanness. She could not see it.
♥ "If you leave now, when may I hope to see you?"
"A little after nine, I'd imagine."
"That will be too soon. The young lady is not here yet, and even if she were she would not be asleep."
Startled, Eguchi did not answer.
"I should have her asleep by eleven. I'll be waiting for you any time after that."
The woman's speech was slow and calm, but Eguchi's heart raced.
"About eleven, then," he said, his throat dry.
What does it matter whether she's asleep or not, he should have been able to say, not seriously, perhaps, but half in jest. He would have liked to meet her before she went to sleep, he could have said. But somehow the words caught in his throat. He had come up against the secret rule of the house. Because it was such a strange rule, it had to be followed all the more strictly. Once it was broken, the place became no more than an ordinary bawdy house. The sad requests of the old men, the allurements, all disappeared. Eguchi himself was startled at the fact that he had caught his breath so sharply upon being told that nine was too early, that the girl would not be asleep, that the woman would have her asleep by eleven. Might it be called the surprise of suddenly being pulled away from the everyday world? For the girl would be asleep and certain not to wake up.
Was he too quick or too slow, going again after a fortnight to a house he had not thought to revisit? He had not, in any case, resisted the temptation by force of will. He had not meant to indulge again in this sort of ugly senile dalliance, and in fact he was not yet as senile as the other men who visited the place. And yet that first visit had not left behind ugly memories. The guilt was there. But he felt that he had not in all his sixty-seven years spent another night so clean. So he still felt when he awoke in the morning. The sleeping medicine had worked, it seemed, and he had slept until eight, later than usual. No part of him was touching the girl. It was a sweet, childlike awakening, in her young warmth and soft scent.
♥ The ugly senility of the sad men who came to this house was not many years away for Eguchi himself. The immeasurable expanse of sex, its bottomless depth-what part of it had Eguchi known in his sixty-seven years? And around the old men, new flesh, young flesh, beautiful flesh was forever being born. Were not the longings of the sad old men for the unfinished dream, the regret for days lost without ever being had, concealed in the secret of this house? Eguchi had thought before that girls who did not awaken were ageless freedom for old men. Asleep and unspeaking, they spoke as the old men wished.
♥ Nor was there any doubt that, for the old men who paid out the money, sleeping beside such a girl was a happiness not of this world. Because the girl would not awaken, the aged guests need not feel the shame of their years. They were quite free to indulge in unlimited dreams and memories of women. Was that not why they felt no hesitation at paying more than for women awake? And the old men were confident in the knowledge that the girls put to sleep for them knew nothing of them. Nor did the old men know anything of the girls-not even what clothes they wore-to give clues of position and character. The reasons went beyond such simple matters as disquiet about later complications. They were a strange light at the bottom of a deep darkness.
♥ ..but instead he brought her slowly into his arms. She did not resist, nor did she speak. She seemed to find it hard to breathe. Her breath came sweetly against the old man's face. His own breathing was irregular. He was aroused again by this girl who was his to do with as he wished. What sort of sadness would assail her in the morning if he made a woman of her? How would the direction of her life be changed? She would in any case know nothing until morning.
"Mother." It was like a groan. "Wait, wait. Do you have to go? I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
"What are you dreaming of? It's a dream, a dream." Old Eguchi took her more tightly in his arms, thinking to end the dream. The sadness in her voice stabbed at him. Her breasts were pressed flat against him. Her arms moved. Was she trying to embrace him, thinking him her mother? No, even though she had been put to sleep, even though she was a virgin, the girl was unmistakably a witch. It seemed to Eguchi that he had not in all his sixty-seven years felt so fully the skin of a young witch. If somewhere there was a weird legend demanding a heroine, this was the girl for it.
It came to seem that she was not the witch but the bewitched. And she was alive while asleep. Her mind had been put into a deep sleep and her body had awakened as a woman. She had become a woman's body, without mind. And was it so well trained that the woman of the house called it "experienced."
♥ But she was more beautiful, she had come into bloom. Even though the change might be the physiological one from girl to young wife, it did not seem that there would be this flower-like brightness if a shadow lay over her heart. After she had her baby her skin was clearer, as though she had been washed to the depths, and she seemed more in possession of herself.
And was that it? Was that why, in "the house of the sleeping beauties," as he lay with the girl's arm over his eyes, the images of the camellia in full bloom and the other flowers came to him? There was of course neither in the girl sleeping here not in Eguchi's youngest daughter the richness of the camellia. But the richness of a girl's body was not something one knew by looking at her or by lying quietly beside her. It was not to be compared with the richness of camellias. What flowed deep behind his eyelids from the girl's arm was the current of life, the melody of life, the lure of life, and, for an old man, the recovery of life.
♥ It was a house frequented by old men who could no longer use women as women; but Eguchi, on his third visit, knew that to sleep with such a girl was a fleeting consolation, the pursuit of a vanished happiness in being alive. And were there among them old men who secretly asked to sleep forever beside a girl who had been put to sleep? There seemed to be a sadness in a young girl's body that called up in an old man a longing for death. But perhaps Eguchi was, among the old men who came to the house, one of the more easily moved; and perhaps most of them but wanted to drink in the youth of girls put to sleep, to enjoy girls who would not awaken.
♥ For Eguchi when he came to this house, there was nothing more beautiful than a young face in dreamless sleep. Might it be called the sweetest consolation to be found in this world? No woman, however beautiful, could conceal her age when she was asleep. And even when a woman was not beautiful she was a her best asleep. or perhaps this house chose girls whose sleeping faces were particularly beautiful. He felt his life, his troubles over the years, fade away as he gazed at the small face. It would have been a happy night had he even now taken the tablets and gone off to sleep; but he lay quietly, his eyes closed. He did not want to sleep-for the girl, having made him remember the woman in Kobe, might bring other memories too.
♥ This girl was the first of the "sleeping beauties" who had shown him her tongue. The impulse toward a misdeed more exciting than putting his finger to her tongue flashed through him.
But the misdeed did not take clear shape in Eguchi's mind as cruelty and terror. What was the very worst thing a man could do to a woman? The affairs with the Kobe woman and the fourteen-year-old prostitute, for instance, were of but a moment in a long life, and they flowed away in a moment. To marry, to rear his daughters, these things were on the surface good; but to have had the long years in his power, to have controlled their lives, to have warped their natures even, these might be evil things. Perhaps, beguiled by custom and order, one's sense of evil went numb.
♥ In the lips parted in sleep, the old man saw youth.
The fact of her being so very young may have caused the impulse to flash though him; but it seemed to him that among the old men who secretly came to this "house of the sleeping beauties," there must be some who not only looked wistfully back to the vanished past but sought to forget the evil they had done through their lives. Old Kiga, who had introduced Eguchi to the house, had of course not revealed the secrets of the other guests. There were probably only a few of them. Eguchi could imagine that they were worldly successes. But among them must be some who had made their successes by wrongdoing and kept their gains by repeated wrongdoing. They would not be men at peace with themselves. They would be among the defeated, rather-victims of terror. In their hearts as they lay against the flesh of naked young girls put to sleep would be more than fear of approaching death and regret for their lost youth. There might also be remorse, and the turmoil so common in the families of the successful. They would have no Buddha before whom to kneel. The naked girl would know nothing, would not open her eyes, if one of the old men were to hold her tight in his arms, shed cold tears, even sob and wail. The old man need feel no shame, no damage to his pride. The regrets and the sadness could flow quite freely. And might not the "sleeping beauty" herself be a Buddha of sorts? And she was flesh and blood. Her young skin and scent might be forgiveness for the sad old men.
♥ "What is the worst thing an old man can do?"
"There are no bad things in this house." She lowered her youthful voice, which seemed to impose itself upon him with a new force.
"No bad things?"
The woman's dark eyes were calm. "Of course, if you were to try to strangle one of the girls, it would be like wrenching the arm of a baby."
The remark was distasteful. "She wouldn't even wake up then?"
"I think not."
"Made to order if you wanted to commit suicide and take someone with you."
"Please do, if you feel lonely about doing it by yourself."
"And when you're too lonely even for suicide?"
"I suppose there are such times for old people."
♥ He forced upon himself a picture of the figure in the daytime, and, to subdue the temptation, he gave her an awkward gait. The excitement faded. But what was awkwardness in a walking girl? What were well-shaped legs? What, for a sixty-seven-year-old man with a girl who was probably for the one night only, were intelligence, culture, barbarity? He was but touching her. And, put to sleep, she knew nothing of the fact that an ugly old man was touching her. Nor would she know tomorrow. Was she a toy, a sacrifice? Old Eguchi had come to this house only four times, and yet the feeling that with each new visit there was a new numbness inside him was especially strong tonight.
♥ Any kind of inhumanity, given practice, becomes human. All the varieties of transgression are buried in the darkness of the world.
♥ It was the body of woman that invited man into the lower circles of hell.
♥ A thought came to him: the aged have death, and the young have love, and death comes once, and love comes over and over again.
♥ From outside there came the faint rustle of sleet. The sound of the sea had faded away. Old Eguchi could see the great, dark sea, on which the sleet fell and melted. A wild bird like a great eagle flew skimming the waves, something in its mouth dripping blood. Was it not a human infant? It could not be. Perhaps it was the specter of human iniquity. He shook his head gently on the pillow and the specter went away.
♥ He felt something like contrition turned upon itself. And there was contrition too for a life that seemed likely to have a timid ending. He did not have the courage of his youngest daughter, with whom he had gone to see the camellia.
♥ The new year came, the wild sea was of dead winter. On land there was little wind.
♥ "The ghost should be coming out one of these nights."
"I'd like to have a good talk with it."
"And what about?"
"About sad old men."
"I was joking."
He took a sip of tea.
"Yes, of course. You were joking. But I have a ghost here inside me. You have one too."
♥ There was lipstick on the handkerchief, and the girl's had been wiped away; and would she think, if he left it by her pillow, that he had stolen a kiss? The guests here were of course free to kiss. Kissing was not among the forbidden acts. A man could kiss, however senile he was. The girl would not avoid him, and she would never know. The sleeping lips might be cold and wet. Do not the dead lips of a woman one has loved give the greater thrill of emotion? The urge was not strong with Eguchi, as he thought of the bleak senility of the old men who frequented the house.
♥ Toying with the girl's fingers, he closed his eyes. The small-boned fingers were supple, so supple that it seemed they would bend indefinitely without breaking. He wanted to take them in his mouth. Her breasts were small but round and high. They fitted into the palm of his hand. The roundness at her hips was similar. Woman is infinite, thought the old man, with a touch of sadness.
♥ "You'll catch cold." He covered her, and turned off her side of the blanket. The spell that was a woman's life, he thought, was not so great a thing. Suppose he were to throttle her. It would be easy. It would be no trouble at all even for an old man. He took his handkerchief and wiped the cheek that had been against her breast. The girl's oily smell seemed to come from it. The sound of the girl's heart stayed on, deep in his ear. He put a hand to his own heart. Perhaps because it was his own, it seemed the stronger of the two.
♥ But he need not fear that she would awaken. He lay still for a time.
"Shall I ask her to forgive me? As the last woman in my life?" The girl behind him seemed to seek to arouse him. He put out his hand and felt. The flesh there was as at her breasts.
"Be quiet. Listen to the winter waves and be quiet." He sought to calm himself.
"These girls have been put to sleep. They might as well be paralyzed. They have been given some poison or some strong drug." And why? "Why if not for money?" Yet he found himself hesitating. Every woman was different from every other. He knew that; and yet was the one before him so very different that he was ready to inflict upon her a wound that would not heal, a sorrow to last through her life? The sixty-seven-year-old Eguchi could, if he wished, think that all women's bodies were alike. And in this girl there was neither affirmation nor denial, there was no response whatsoever. All that distinguished her from a corpse was that she breathed and had warm blood. Indeed tomorrow morning when the living girl awoke, would she be much different from an open-eyed corpse? There was now in the girl no love or shame or fear. When she awoke there could remain bitterness and regret. She would not know who had taken her. She could but infer that it was an old man. She would probably not tell the woman of the house. She would conceal to the end the fact that the rule of this house of old men had been broken, and so no one would know but herself. Her soft skin clung to Eguchi. The dark girl, perhaps after all chilly now that her side of the blanket had been turned off, pressed against Eguchi with her naked back. One of her feet was between the feet of the fair-skinned girl. Eguchi felt his strength leave him-and again he wanted to laugh. He reached for the sleeping medicine. He was sandwiched tightly between them and could move only with difficulty. His hand on the fair girl's forehead, he looked at the usual tablets.
"Shall I go without them tonight?" he muttered.
It was clearly a strong drug. He would drop effortlessly into sleep. For the first time it occurred to him to wonder whether all the old men who came to the house obediently took the medicine. But was it not compounding the ugliness of old age if, regretting the hours lost in sleep, they refrained from taking it? He thought that he himself had not yet entered into that companionship of ugliness. Once again he drank down the medicine. He had once said, he remembered, that he wanted the drug the girl had taken. The woman had answered that it was dangerous for old men. He had not insisted.
Did "dangerous" suggest dying in one's sleep? Eguchi was but an old man of ordinary circumstances. Being human, he fell from time to time into a lonely emptiness, a cold despondency. Would this not be a most desirable place to die? To arouse curiosity, to invite the disdain of the world-would these not be to cap his life with a proper death? All of his acquaintances would be surprised. He could not calculate the injury he would do to his family; but to die in his sleep between, for instance, the two young girls tonight-might that not be the ultimate wish of a man in his last years? No, it was not so. Like old Fukura, he would be carried off to a miserable hot spring inn, and people would be told that he had committed suicide from an overdose of sleeping medicine. Since there would be no suicide note, it would be said that he had been despondent about the prospects ahead. He could see the faint smile of the woman of the house.
♥ "The last woman in my life? Why must I think so? Even for a minute." And who had been the first woman in his life?
He was less sleepy than dazed.
The thought flashed across his mind: the first woman in his life had been his mother.
Now at sixty-seven, as he lay between two naked girls, a new truth came from deep inside him. Was it blasphemy, was it yearning? He opened his eyes and blinked, as if to drive away a nightmare. But the drug was working. He had a dull headache. Drowsily, he pursued the image of his mother; and then he sighed, and took two breasts, one of each of the girls, in the palms of his hands. A smooth one and an oily one. He closed his eyes.
..It was natural that when old Eguchi thought of his mother as the first woman in his life, he thought too of her death.
"Ah!" The curtains that walled the secret room seemed the color of blood. He closed his eyes tight, but that red would not disappear. He was half asleep from the drug. The fresh young breasts of the two girls were in the palms of his two hands. His conscience and his reason were numbed, and there seemed to be tears at the corners of his eyes.
Why, in a place like this, had he thought of his mother as the first woman in his life?
~~House of the Sleeping Beauties.
♥ Because I was holding something important to me, I had looked in both directions. The sound of the horn had been so far away that I had thought it must be meant for someone else. I looked in the direction from which it came, but could see no one. I could see only the headlights. They widened into a blur of faint purple. A strange color for headlights. I stood on the curb when I had crossed and watched it pass. A young woman in vermilion was driving. It seemed to me that she turned toward me and bowed. I wanted to run off, fearing that the girl had come for her arm. Then I remembered that she would hardly be able to drive with only one. But had not the woman in the car seen what I was carrying? Had she not sensed it with a woman's intuition? I would have to take care not to encounter another of the sex before I reached my apartment. The rear lights were also a faint purple. I still did not see the car. In the ashen fog a lavender blur floated up and moved away.
"She is driving for no reason, for no reason at all except to be driving. And while she drives she will simpler disappear," I muttered to myself. "And what was that sitting in the back seat?"
Nothing, apparently. Was it because I went around carrying girls' arms that I felt so unnerved by emptiness? The car she drove carried the clammy night fog. And something about her had turned it faintly purple in the headlights. If not from her own body, whence had come that purplish light? Could the arm I concealed have so clothed in emptiness a woman driving alone on such a night? Had she nodded at the girl's arm from her car? Perhaps on such a night there were angels and ghosts abroad protecting women. Perhaps she had ridden not in a car but in a purple light. Her drive had not been empty. She had spied out my secret.
♥ Avoiding the automatic elevator, I made my way stealthily up the narrow stairs to the third floor. Not being left-handed, I had difficulty unlocking the door. The harder I tried the more my hand trembled-as if in terror after a crime. Something would be waiting for me inside the room, a room where I lived in solitude; and was not the solitude a presence? With the girl's arm I was no longer alone. And so perhaps my own solitude waited there to intimidate me.
♥ The hand took mine gently. The nails, carefully polished, were a faint pink. The tips extended well beyond the fingers.
Against my own short, thick nails, hers possessed a strange beauty, as if they belonged to no human creature. With such fingertips, a woman perhaps transcended mere humanity. Or did she pursue womanhood itself? A shell luminous from the pattern inside it, a petal bathed in dew-I thought of the obvious likenesses. Yet I could think of no shell or petal whose color and shape resembled them. They were the nails on the girl's fingers, comparable to nothing else. More translucent than a delicate shell, than a thin petal, they seemed to hold a dew of tragedy. Every day and every night her energies were poured into the polishing of this tragic beauty. It penetrated my solitude. Perhaps my yearning, my solitude, transformed them into dew.
♥ It was natural that I should want all the more to touch those fingertips, but I held myself back. My solitude held me back. She was a woman on whose body few tender spots could be expected to remain.
And on the body of the girl who had lent me the arm they would be beyond counting. Perhaps, toying with the fingertips of such a girl, I would feel not guilt but affection. But she had not lent me the arm for such mischief. I must not make a comedy of her gesture.
♥ I noticed not that the window itself was open but that the curtain was undrawn.
"Will anything look in?" asked the girl's arm.
"Some man or woman. Nothing else."
"Nothing human would see me. If anything it would be a self. Yours."
"Self? What is that? Where is it?"
"Far away," said the arm, as if singing in consolation. "People walk around looking for selves, far away."
"And do they come upon them?"
"Far away," said the arm once more.
♥ Although I think I understand how a woman feels when she gives herself to a man, there is still something unexplained about the act. What is it to her? Why should she wish to do it, why should she take the initiative? I could never really accept the surrender, even knowing that the body of every woman was made for it. Even now, old as I am, it seems strange. And the ways in which various women go about it: unalike if you wish, or similar perhaps, or even identical. Is that not strange? Perhaps the strangeness I find in it all is the curiosity of a younger man, perhaps the despair of one advanced in years. Or perhaps some spiritual debility I suffer from.
Her anguish was not common to all women in the act of surrender. And it was with her only the one time. The silver thread was cut, the golden bowl destroyed.
♥ I gazed at the arm on my knee. There was a shadow at the inside of the elbow. It seemed that I might be able to suck it in. I pressed it to my lips, to gather in the shadow.
"It tickles. Do behave yourself." The arm as around my neck, avoiding my lips.
"Just when I was having a good drink."
"And what were you drinking?"
I did not answer.
"What were you drinking?"
"The smell of light? Of skin."
~~One Arm.
♥ 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."
♥ "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 form 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 woulds 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.
..Sometimes a dog would come up to him on the street. He would talk to it all the way home, he would feed it and give it a place to sleep. It pleased him that a dog should sense warmth in him. But after he came to keep his own dogs he no longer had an eye for mongrels. So it should be with human beings, he said to himself, scorning the families of the world while deriding his own loneliness.
So it was with the skylark. The feeling of pity with which he thought to take it in had quickly vanished. Telling himself that there was no point in saving a piece of garbage, he had left the children to torture it to death.
♥ A man is drawn to a woman like his mother, loves a woman like his first sweetheart, wants to marry a woman like his dead wife. Is it not the same with birds and beasts? He lived with them because he wanted to savor in solitude a more independent kind of arrogance..
♥ He thought: "They'll say that I died with a beautiful woman."
She lay with her back to him, her eyes calmly closed, her head up. Then she brought her hands together in prayer. He was struck, as by lightning, by the joy of emptiness.
"We are not to die."
He had of course not been of a mind to kill and to die. He did not know whether or not Chikako had been serious. Her face revealed nothing. It was a midsummer afternoon.
Quite taken by surprise, he neither spoke nor thought again of suicide. The knowledge echoed deep in his heart that whatever happened he must treasure this woman.
~~Of Birds and Beasts.