House of the Sleeping Beauties Read online

  He slipped quietly under, afraid that the girl he knew would sleep on might awaken. She seemed to be quite naked. There was no reaction, no hunching of the shoulders or pulling in of the hips, to suggest that she sensed his presence. There should be in a young girl, however soundly she slept, some sort of quick reaction. But this would not be an ordinary sleep, he knew. The thought made him avoid touching her as he stretched out. Her knee was slightly forward, leaving his legs in an awkward position. It took no inspection to tell him that she was not on the defensive, that she did not have her right knee resting on her left. The right knee was pulled back, the leg stretched out. The angle of the shoulders as she lay on her left side and that of the hips seemed at variance, because of the inclination of her torso. She did not appear to be very tall.

  The fingers of the hand old Eguchi had shaken gently were also in deep sleep. The hand lay as he had dropped it. As he pulled his pillow back the hand fell away. One elbow on the pillow, he gazed at it. As if it were alive, he muttered to himself. It was of course alive, and he meant only to say how very pretty it was; but once he had uttered them the words took on an ominous ring. Though this girl lost in sleep had not put an end to the hours of her life, had she not lost them, had them sink into bottomless depths? She was not a living doll, for there could be no living doll; but, so as not to shame an old man no longer a man, she had been made into a living toy. No, not a toy: for the old men, she could be life itself. Such life was, perhaps, life to be touched with confidence. To Eguchi’s farsighted old eyes the hand from close up was yet smoother and more beautiful. It was smooth to the touch, but he could not see the texture.

  It came to the old eyes that in the earlobes was the same warm redness of blood that grew richer toward the tips of the fingers. He could see the ears through the hair. The flush of the earlobes argued the freshness of the girl with a plea that stabbed at him. Eguchi had first wandered into this secret house out of curiosity, but it seemed to him that men more senile than he might come to it with even greater happiness and sorrow. The girl’s hair was long, possibly for old men to play with. Lying back on his pillow, Eguchi brushed it aside to expose her ear. The sheen of the hair behind the ear was white. The neck and the shoulder too were young and fresh. They did not yet have the fullness of woman. He looked around the room. Only his own clothes were in the box. There was no sign of the girl’s. Perhaps the woman had taken them away, but he started up at the thought that the girl might have come into the room naked. She was to be looked at. He knew that she had been put to sleep for the purpose, and that there was no call for this new surprise; but he covered her shoulder and closed his eyes. The scent of a baby came to him in the girl’s scent. It was the milky scent of a nursing baby, and richer than that of the girl. Impossible—that the girl should have had a child, that her breasts should be swollen, that milk should be oozing from the nipples. He gazed afresh at her forehead and cheeks, and at the girlish line from the jaw down over the neck. Although he knew well enough already, he slightly raised the quilt that covered the shoulder. The breast was not one that had given milk. He touched it softly with his finger. It was not wet. 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 tinged with sorrow. More than sorrow or 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.

  “Wake up. Wake up.” Eguchi shook at the girl’s shoulder. Then he lifted her head. “Wake up. Wake up.”

  It was a feeling for the girl, rising inside him, that made him do so. A moment had come in which the old man could not bear the fact that the girl was sleeping, that she did not speak, that she did not know his face and his voice; that she knew nothing of what was happening, that she did not know the man Eguchi who was with her. Not the smallest part of his existence reached her. The girl would not wake up, it was the heaviness of a slumbering head in his hand; and yet he could admit the fact that she seemed to frown slightly as a definite living answer. He held his hand motionless. If she were to awaken upon such a slight motion, then the mystery of the place, which old Kiga, the man who had introduced him to it, had described as “like sleeping with a secret Buddha,” would be gone. For the old men who were customers the woman could “trust,” sleeping with a beauty who would not awaken was a temptation, an adventure, a joy they could trust. Old Kiga had said to Eguchi that only when he was beside a girl who had been put to sleep could he himself feel alive.

  When Kiga had visited Eguchi, he had looked out into the garden. Something red lay on the brown autumn moss.

  “What can it be?”

  He had gone down to look. The dots were red aoki berries. Numbers of them lay on the ground. Kiga picked one up. Toying with it, he told Eguchi of the secret house. He went to the house, he said, when the despair of old age was too much for him.

  “It seems like a very long time since I lost hope in every last woman. There’s a house where they put women to sleep so they don’t wake up.”

  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? But this was Eguchi’s first experience of such a woman. The girl had no doubt had this experience of old men numbers of times before. Giving everything over to him, aware of nothing, in a sleep as of suspended animation, she breathed gently, her innocent face on its side. Certain old men would perhaps caress every part of her body, others would be racked with sobs. The girl would not know, in either case. Even at this thought Eguchi was able to do nothing. In taking his hand from her neck, he was as cautious as if he were handling a breakable object; but the impulse to arouse her by violence still had not left him.

  As he withdrew his hand, her head turned gently and her shoulder with it, so that she was lying face up. He pulled back, wondering if she might open her eyes. Her nose and lips shone with youth, in the light from the ceiling. She brought her left hand to her mouth. She seemed about to take the index finger between her teeth, and he wondered if it might be a way she had when she slept; but she brought it softly to her lips, and no further. The lips parted slightly to show her teeth. She had been breathing through her nose, and now she breathed through her mouth. Her breath seemed to come a little faster. He wondered if she might be in pain, and decided she was not. Because the lips were parted, a faint smile seemed to float on the cheeks. The sound of waves breaking against the high cliff came nearer. The sound of the receding waves suggested large rocks at the base of the cliff. Water caught behind them seemed to follow after. 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. He opened the packet. In it were two white pills. If he took one he would fall into a slumber; two, and he would fall into a sleep as of death. That would be just as well, he thought, looking at the pills; and the milk brought an unpleasant memory and a lunatic memory to him.

  “Milk. It smells of milk. It smells like a baby.” Starting to fold the coat he had taken off, the woman glared at him, her face tense. “Your baby. You took it in your arms when you left home, didn’t you? Didn’t you? I hate it! I hate it!”

  Her hands trembling violently, the woman stood up and threw his coat to the floor. “I hate it. Coming here just after you’ve had a baby in your arms.” Her voice was harsh, but the look in her eyes was worse. She was a geisha with whom he had for some time been familiar. She had known all along that he had a wife and children, but the smell of the nursing child brought violent revulsion and jealousy. Eguchi and the geisha were not again on good terms.

  The smell the geisha so disliked had been from his youngest child. Eguchi had had a lover before he was married. Her parents became suspicious, and his occasional meetings with her were turbulent. Once when he withdrew his face he saw that her breast was lightly stained with blood. He was startled, but, as if nothing had happened, he brought his face back and gently licked it away. The girl, in a trance, did not know what had happened. The delirium had passed. Even when he told her she did not seem to be in pain.

  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.

  “Before I go to sleep I close my eyes and count the men I wouldn’t mind being kissed by. I count them up on my fingers. It’s very pleasant. But it makes me sad when I can’t think of even ten.” These remarks had been made to the young Eguchi by the wife of a business executive, a middle-aged woman, a woman of society, and, report had it, an intelligent woman. She was waltzing with him at the time. Taking this sudden confession to mean that he was among those she would not mind being kissed by, Eguchi held her hand less tightly.

  “I only count them,” she said nonchalantly. “You’re young, and I suppose you don’t find it sad trying to get to sleep. And if you do you always have your wife. But give it a try once in a while. I find it very good medicine.”

  Her voice was if anything dry, and Eguchi did not answer. She had said that she only counted them; but one could suspect that she called up their faces and bodies in her mind. To conjure up ten would take a considerable amount of time and imagining. At the thought, the perfume as of a love potion from this woman somewhat past her prime came more strongly to Eguchi. She was free to draw in her mind as she wished the figure of Eguchi among the men she would not mind being kissed by. The matter was no concern of his, and he could neither resist nor complain; and yet it was sullying, the fact that without his knowing it he was being enjoyed in the mind of a middle-aged woman. But he had not forgotten her words. He was not without a suspicion afterwards that the woman might have been playing with him, or that she had invented the story to make fun of him; but later still, only the words remained. The woman was long dead. Old Eguchi no longer had these doubts. And, clever woman, she had died after having imagined herself kissing how many hundreds of men?

  As old age approached, Eguchi would, on nights when he had difficulty sleeping, sometimes remember the woman’s words, and count up numbers of women on his fingers; but he did not stop at anything so simple as picturing those he would not mind kissing. He would travel back over memories of women with whom he had had affairs. An old love had come back tonight because the sleeping beauty had given him the illusion that he smelled milk. Perhaps the blood on the breast of that girl from long ago had made him sense in the girl tonight an odor that did not exist. Perhaps it was a melancholy comfort for an old man to be sunk in memories of women who would not come back from the far past, even while he fondled a beauty who would not awaken. Eguchi was filled with a warm repose that had loneliness in it. He had but touched her lightly to see whether her breast was wet, and the twisted thought had not come to him of leaving her to be startled, when she awoke after him, at having had blood drawn from her breast. Her breasts seemed to be beautifully rounded. A strange thought came to him: why, among all animals, in the long course of the world, had the breasts of the human female alone become beautiful? Was it not to the glory of the human race to have made woman’s breasts so beautiful?

  It might be so too with lips. Old Eguchi thought of women getting ready for bed, of women taking off cosmetics before bed. There had been women with pale lips when they took off their lipstick, and women whose lips had shown the dirtiness of age. In the gentle light from the ceiling and the reflection from the velvet on the four walls, it was not clear whether or not the girl was lightly made up, but she had not gone so far as to have her eyebrows shaved. The lips and the teeth between them had a fresh glow. Since she could scarcely have perfumed her mouth, what came to him was the scent of a young woman’s mouth. Eguchi did not like wide, dark nipples. From the glimpse he had had when he raised the quilt, it appeared that hers were still small and pink. She was sleeping face up, and he could kiss her breasts. She was certainly not a girl whose breasts he would have disliked kissing. If it was so with a man his age, thought Eguchi, then the really old men who came to the house must quite lose themselves in the joy, be willing to take any chance, to pay any price. There had probably been greedy ones among them, and their images were not wholly absent from Eguchi’s mind. The girl was asleep and knew nothing. Would the face and the form remain untouched and unsullied, as they were before him now? Because she was so beautiful asleep, Eguchi stopped short of the ugly act toward which these thoughts led him. Was the difference between him and the other old men that he still had in him something to function as a man? For the others, the girl would pass the night in bottomless sleep. He had twice tried, though gently, to arouse her. He did not himself know what he had meant to do if by chance the girl had opened her eyes, but he had probably made the try out of affection. No, he supposed it had rather been from his own disquiet and emptiness.

  “Maybe I should go to sleep?” he heard himself muttering uselessly, and he added: “It’s not forever. Not forever, for her or for me.”

  He closed his eyes. This strange night was, as all other nights, one from which he would wake up alive in the morning. The girl’s elbow, as she lay with her index finger touched to her mouth, got in his way. He took her wrist and brought it to his side. He felt her pulse, holding the wrist between his index and middle fingers. It was gentle and regular. Her quiet breath was somewhat slower than Eguchi’s. From time to time the wind passed over the house, but it no longer carried the sound of approaching winter. The roar of the waves against the cliff softened while rising. Its echo seemed to come up from the ocean as music sounding in the girl’s body, the beating in her breast, and the pulse at her wrist added to it. In time with the music, a pure white butterfly danced past his closed eyelids. He took his hand from her wrist. Nowhere was he touching her. The scent of her bre
ath, of her body, of her hair, were none of them strong.

  Eguchi thought of the several days when he had run off to Kyoto, taking the back-country route, with the girl whose breast had been wet with blood. Perhaps the memory was vivid because the warmth of the fresh young body beside him came over to him faintly. There were numerous short tunnels on the railroad from the western provinces into Kyoto. Each time they went into a tunnel, the girl, as if frightened, would bring her knee to Eguchi’s and take his hand. And each time they came out of one there would be a hill or a small ravine with a rainbow over it.

  “How pretty,” she would say each time, or “How nice.” She had a word of praise for each little rainbow, and it would be no exaggeration to say that, searching to the left and the right, she found one each time they came out of a tunnel. Sometimes it would be so faint as to be hardly there at all. She came to feel something ominous in these strangely abundant rainbows.

  “Don’t you suppose they’re after us? I have a feeling they’ll catch us when we get to Kyoto. Once they take me back they won’t let me out of the house again.”

  Eguchi, who had just graduated from college and gone to work, had no way to make a living in Kyoto, and he knew that, unless he and the girl committed suicide together, they would presently have to go back to Tokyo; but, from the small rainbows, the cleanness of the girl’s secret parts came before him and would not leave. He had seen it at an inn by a river in Kanazawa. It had been on a night of snow flurries. So struck had he been by the cleanness that he had held his breath and felt tears welling up. He had not seen such cleanness in the women of all the decades since; and he had come to think that he understood all cleanness, that cleanness in secret places was the girl’s own property. He tried to laugh the notion away, but it became a fact in the flow of longing, and it was still a powerful memory, not to be shaken from the old Eguchi. A person sent by the girl’s family took her back to Tokyo, and soon she was married.