General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

House of Sleeping Beauties

House of Sleeping Beauties (眠れる美女, Nemureru Bijo) is a novella by the Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata (川端康成), first published in 1961, in which the 67-year-old Eguchi pays five visits to a secretive establishment where elderly men spend the night beside young women drugged into deep sleep, under a strict rule that they cannot be violated¹. Kawabata, whose spare, lyrical prose won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968 as the first Japanese author to receive the award, wrote the work late in his career, and it has been repeatedly adapted for the screen, most prominently in a 2006 German film by Vadim Glowna²^•³.

Key fact	Detail
Original publication	Nemureru Bijo (眠れる美女), first published January 1, 1961¹^•²
Premise	Old men pay to sleep beside beautiful young women sedated into deep sleep, where contact occurs despite house rules, ²^•¹⁹
Structure	Five parts, one for each of Eguchi's five visits to the house¹
English translation	Edward Seidensticker's House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories, 160 pages, also containing "One Arm" and "Of Birds and Beasts"²
Author's standing	Kawabata won the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Japanese laureate²
Best-known film adaptation	Das Haus der schlafenden Schönen (Germany, 2006), written and directed by Vadim Glowna, who also plays Edmond³
Film reception	Metascore 21 (generally unfavorable); Rotten Tomatoes 28% from 18 reviews⁴^•⁵

Spoilers

Plot and structure

The novella consists of five parts, each depicting one of Eguchi's stays at the house¹. The women there are, according to the innkeeper, not forced but volunteers who take large doses of sleeping pills in exchange for money, and the house's rule forbids the clients to violate them¹. Near the end, Eguchi considers breaking "the rule of the house" with one of the girls, followed by a fantasy of throttling her⁶.

Because the sleeping girls lack any means of expression, the narrative weight falls on Eguchi's memories and dreams, which surface between sleep and semi-consciousness. The women serve as symbols of youth and beauty set against Eguchi's old age and sorrow, and the story moves along the line between sexuality and death, youth and old age, beauty and ugliness¹^•⁶. On his last visit, Eguchi wants to die beside the beauty⁷.

Themes and interpretation

Kawabata appropriates the central image of the Western fairy-tale sleeping beauty and applies it to a dark story set at night, shrouded in the gloominess and cold of late life. The novella extends his aesthetic traditions of mono no aware (the pathos of things) and in'ei (shadow and subtlety), and the novelist Yukio Mishima called it "most certainly an esoteric masterpiece"¹.

Scholarly readings differ on what Eguchi's nights amount to. One interpretation describes his recurring dreams as a "negative life review", a failed version of autobiographical narration, and argues that his silence in the face of a death in the story leaves him in ethical foreclosure rather than renewal¹. The Chinese translator Ye Weiqu read the depiction of the old man and the sleeping beauties as conveying "indulgence, temptation, and redemption"¹. The premise itself, old men beside unconscious young women, has made the book uncomfortable for many readers, raising questions of agency and temptation⁸.

English-language collection

The story reached English readers through House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories, translated by Edward Seidensticker, a 160-page collection that also includes "One Arm", in which a young woman gifts a man her right arm for the night, and "Of Birds and Beasts", about a middle-aged man's affair with a dancer and his abnormal attachment to his pets². On Goodreads the collection holds a 3.60 average from 9,536 ratings².

Film adaptations

Japanese versions. Kozaburo Yoshimura filmed the novella in 1968; for its Canadian release, "Beauties" was replaced by "Virgins" in the title, emphasizing the claim to virginity⁹. A second Japanese adaptation, directed by Hiroto Yokoyama, was released in 1995 with a runtime of 1 hour 50 minutes, credited to Kawabata's novel and starring Yoshio Harada as Eguchi¹⁰.

The 2006 German film. Das Haus der schlafenden Schönen (English title House of the Sleeping Beauties) was written, directed, produced, and headlined by Vadim Glowna, with Angela Winkler as Madame, Maximilian Schell as Kogi, and Birol Ünel as Herr Gold; Ciro Cappellari was the director of photography and the music was by Nikolaus Glowna and Siggi Müller³. Shooting took place in Berlin from February 3 to April 23, 2005, and the film opened in German theaters on November 2, 2006¹¹^•³. Glowna moved the setting to present-day Berlin and, in his words, inherited only the sleeping girls, Madame, and Eguchi (renamed Edmond) from Kawabata's plot, continuing the story beyond the novel and expanding its thriller element¹². His research found that such an establishment had actually existed in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, which convinced him the story could be told in Europe as well as Japan¹². In the film, Edmond is haunted by the deaths of his wife and daughter in a car accident, and his friend Kogi advises him to visit the house³.

The film's length is given as 103 minutes in German sources and 99 minutes in the American press kit and streaming listings³^•¹²^•¹³. It was rated FSK 16 in Germany and R-18 in Japan, and not rated in the United States¹⁴.

Reception of the 2006 film

The American release went to First Run Features and opened in limited theaters on November 14, 2008, grossing $4,509 domestically¹⁵. Critics were largely negative: the film scored 21 on Metacritic, with 6 of 8 collected reviews negative, and 28 percent on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer⁴^•⁵. Roger Ebert gave it one star, writing that the premise offends "even dirty old men, dramatizing as it does their dirtiness and oldness"⁵. The New York Post's review was the most favorable, arguing that the film's nudity serves a deeper purpose as, in Glowna's words, a meditation on "transition, remembrance, mourning, guilt, loneliness, sex and death, eroticism and dying"⁴. German critics noted the artful, dreamlike cinematography but found the many inner monologues theatrical and the protagonist kept at too great a distance from the viewer¹⁶.

Legacy

The novella has continued to generate adaptations. Julia Leigh's 2011 film Sleeping Beauty drew on Kawabata's story, alongside Gabriel García Márquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores, the Perrault and Grimm fairy tales, and the biblical story of King Solomon, and Leigh's script appeared on the 2008 Black List of unproduced screenplays¹⁷. Australian scholarship has examined Venero Armanno's novel Candle Life and Leigh's film as contemporary adaptations of the novella¹⁸.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026