From Japan's first Nobel laureate for literature, three superb stories explore the interplay between erotic fantasy and reality in a loner's mind. Kawabata's fiction is noted for combining a traditional Japanese aesthetic with modernist, often surreal trends: his richly lyrical prose is imbued with a sense of loneliness and alienation. In these three tales, underlying the erotic fantasy is the protagonists' lack of connection with other people, and their memories of past loves in an empty sterile life. The title story, "House of the Sleeping Beauties," is about a man who visits a brothel where elderly men can spend a chaste but lecherous night with a drugged, unconscious virgin. As he admires the girl's beauty, he recalls his past womanizing, and reflects on the relentless course of old age. In "One Arm," a young girl removes her right arm and gives it to the narrator to take home for the night, a surreal seduction follows as he speaks to it, tries to allay its fears, caresses it and even replaces his own right arm with it. "Of Birds and Beasts" is about a man who lives alone, with a housemaid, preferring the company of the birds and dogs he keeps to human beings. But rather than living animals, these are beautiful objects which, although they give him pleasure, he treats with casual cruelty, in much the same way as he treated his previous lover, a dancer. Beautiful yet chilling, poetic yet subtly disturbing, these stories make compelling reading.

YASUNARI KAWABATA was born in 1899. He described himself as a child "without home or family" and became, in the novelist Mishima's words, "a perpetual traveler." He lost his parents in infancy, his grandmother and only sister died shortly afterward, and he was fourteen when his grandfather died. In 1917 he left his native Osaka to enter a school in Tokyo, and in 1927-three years after graduating from Tokyo Imperial University-he published a short novel, The Izu Dancer. Probably his best-known work, Snow Country, was completed in 1947 and has come to typify the sense of loneliness and chilly lyricism associated with the world of Kawabata. In his most fertile decade following the end of World War II he produced The Lake, first serialized in 1954, along with two major novels-The Master of Go and The Sound of the Mountain. House of the Sleeping Beauties was published in the early sixties, and Kawabata was made the first Japanese Nobel laureate for literature in 1968. He died in 1972.
EDWARD SEIDENSTICKER, the translator, was born in Colorado. He attended the University of Colorado, and at the outbreak of the Pacific War was assigned to the Navy Language School, where he studied Japanese. After further work at Columbia and Harvard, he settled in Japan in 1948, and spent over ten years there, the first two as a diplomat. After a spell of teaching at Stanford, in 1966 he became Professor of Japanese at the University of Michigan, and it was during the following years in Ann Arbor that most of The Tale of Genji was translated. He is currently Professor of Japanese at Columbia University, teaching for half the year, and living the remaining half in Tokyo.
Among his other translations are a number of works by Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, Kawabata Yasunari, and Mishima Yukio. In recognition of his role in the introduction of Japanese literature abroad, Professor Seidensticker was awarded the prestigious Kikuchi Kan Prize and the Order of the Rising Sun-one of the Japanese government's highest honors.